Charles Snow - The Affair

This was a copy of Howard’s Fellowship thesis, which according to custom had been deposited in the college library. It was about a hundred and fifty pages long, typed — neatly typed, by a professional — on quarto paper. It was bound in stiff green covers, with the title and Howard’s name in gold letters on the outside front cover and also on the spine.

“This does seem to be your thesis, doesn’t it, Dr Howard?” said Dawson-Hill, handing it to him.

“But of course.”

Dawson-Hill asked how many copies there were in existence. The answer was, three more. In the Fellowship competition, the college asked for two copies. He had used the remaining two for other applications.

“This is the show copy, though?”

“You can call it that.”

“Then this” — there was a slip of paper protruding from the thesis and Dawson-Hill opened it at that page — “might be your star print?”

It was the positive which everyone in that room knew. It was pasted in, with a figure 2 below it and no other rubric at all. It stood out, concentric rings of black and grey, like a target for a small-scale archery competition.

“It’s a print, all right.”

“And this print is a fraud?”

I wished Howard would answer a straight question fast. Instead he hesitated, and only at last said, “Yes.”

“That doesn’t need proving, does it?” said Dawson-Hill. “All the scientific opinion agrees that the drawing-pin hole is expanded? Isn’t that true?”

“I suppose so.”

“That is, this print had been expanded, to make it look like something it wasn’t?”

“I suppose so.”

“What about your other prints?”

“Which other prints?”

“You can’t misunderstand me, Dr Howard. The prints in the other copies of your thesis?”

“I think I re-photographed them from this one.”

“You think ?”

“I must have done.”

“And this one, this fake one, came from a negative which you’ve never produced? Where is it, do you know?”

“Of course I don’t know.”

For once articulate, Howard explained that the whole point of what he had said before lunch was that he couldn’t know. He had not seen the negative; Palairet must have made the print and the measurements and Howard had taken them over.

At that, Nightingale broke in.

“I’ve asked you this before, but I still can’t get it straight. You mean to say that you used this print as experimental evidence without having the negative in your hands?”

“I’ve told you so, often enough.”

“It still seems to me a very curious story. I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine anyone doing research like that.”

“I thought the print and the measurements were good enough.”

“That is,” I broke in, “you took them on Palairet’s authority?”

Howard nodded.

Nightingale, with a fresh, open look of incomprehension, was shaking his head.

“Let’s leave this for a moment, if you don’t mind,” said Dawson-Hill. “I’m an ignoramus, of course, but I believe this particular print was regarded — before it was exposed as a fraud — as the most interesting feature of the thesis?”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” said Howard. (I was thinking, why didn’t the fool see the truth and tell it?) “I should have said it was an interesting feature.”

“Very well. Let me be crude. Without that print, and the argument it was supposed to prove, do you believe, Mr Howard, that the thesis would have won you a Fellowship?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Do you agree it couldn’t have stood the slightest chance?”

Howard paused. (Why doesn’t he say Yes, I thought?) “I shouldn’t say that.”

Nightingale again intervened: “There’s not a great deal of substance in the first half, is there?”

“There are those experiments—” Howard seized the thesis and began staring at some graphs.

“I shouldn’t have thought that was very original work, by Fellowship standards,” said Nightingale.

“It’s useful,” said Howard.

“At any rate, you’d be prepared to agree that without this somewhat providential photograph your chances could hardly have been called rosy?” said Dawson-Hill.

This time Howard would not reply.

Dawson-Hill looked surprised, amused, and broke away into his second attack.

“I wonder if you’d mind giving us some illumination on a slightly different matter,” he said. “This incident has somewhat, shall I say, disarranged your career?”

“What do you think?” Howard replied.

“Not to put too fine a point upon it, it’s meant that you have to say goodbye to being a research scientist, and start again? Or is that putting it too high?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And you must have realised that, as soon as this Court first deprived you of your Fellowship?”

“But of course I did.”

“That was nearly eighteen months ago, seventeen months, to be precise?”

“You must have the date.” Howard’s tone was savage.

“So far as my information goes, during that time, that quite appreciable time, you never took any legal action?”

It was the point Nightingale had challenged us to answer, at the Master’s dinner-party after Christmas. I had no doubt that Nightingale had put Dawson-Hill up to it.

“No.”

“You’ve never been to see your solicitor?”

“Not as far as I remember.”

“You must remember? Have you been, or not?”

“No.”

“You never contemplated bringing an action for wrongful dismissal?”

“No.”

“I suggest you weren’t willing to face a court of law?”

Howard sat, glowering at the table. I looked at Crawford: for an instant I was going to protest; then I believed that would make things worse.

“I always thought,” Howard replied at long last, “that the college would give me a square deal.”

“You thought they might give you much more of the benefit of the doubt?”

“I tell you,” Howard said, his voice strained and screeching, “I didn’t want to drag the college through the courts.”

To me this came out of the blue. When Martin and I had pressed him, he had never said so much. Could it be true, or part of the truth? It did not ring true, even to me.

“Surely that would be more magnanimous than any of us could conceive of being,” said Dawson-Hill, “in the circumstances as revealed by you?”

“I didn’t want to drag the college through the courts.”

“Forgive me, but have you really this extreme respect for institutions? I rather gathered that you had slightly less respect for existing institutions than most of us?”

For the first time that day, Howard answered with spirit.

“I’ve got less respect for existing society than most of you have, if that’s what you mean. It’s dying on its feet, and none of you realise how fast it’s dying. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t got respect for some institutions inside it. I can see this university going on, and this college, as far as that goes, long after the system you’re all trying to prop up is sunk without trace, except for a few jeers in the history books.”

Nightingale whispered to Brown. Crawford, not put off by unplacatory statements, suddenly had his interest revived and was ready to argue, but Dawson-Hill got back to work. “Yes, and your interesting attitude towards what I think you called — existing society, wasn’t it? — brings me to another question. What really were your relations with Professor Palairet?”

“All right.”

“But you’ve given me the impression that they were slightly more intimate than one would naturally expect, between a very senior professor and, forgive me, a not yet remarkable research student. That is, the impression you’ve tried to give us is of someone coming in and out of your room, giving you pieces of experimental data and so on, very much as though he were a collaborator of your own standing. Does that sound likely?”