Charles Snow - The Affair

“It’s what happened.”

“But can you suggest any reason why we should think it likely? Didn’t you give Professor Palairet sufficient grounds to be less intimate with you than with other research students, not more?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you must know. Isn’t it common knowledge that Professor Palairet was in ordinary terms a very conservative man?”

“He was a conservative, yes.”

“Surely, actively so?”

“If you put it that way.”

“Didn’t he ask you to stop your open political activities while you were in his laboratory?”

“He said something of the sort.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I couldn’t.”

“Didn’t he object when you appeared as one of the backers of what I believe is called a ‘Front’ organisation? Scientists’ World Peace Conference — wasn’t that the eloquent name?”

“I suppose he did.”

“You must know. Didn’t he give you an ultimatum that, if you appeared in any such organisation again, you would have to leave his laboratory?”

“I shouldn’t have called it an ultimatum.”

“But that is substantially true?”

“There’s something in it.”

“Well, then, does all this correspond to the picture, a rather touching picture, I must say, of professor — student intimacy and bliss, on which your whole account of these incidents appears to depend?”

Howard stared. Dawson-Hill went on: “Further, I suggest to you that your whole account of these incidents doesn’t make sense, whichever way one looks. If we assume, just for an instant, that Professor Palairet did perpetrate a ridiculous fraud, and we also assume the reality of this very touching picture of the professor— student intimacy, then we have to accept that he just gave you some experimental data and you quietly put them into your thesis and your papers as your own? Is that correct?”

It sounded like another point of Nightingale’s. It was a valid one. From the start, Francis and Martin had been troubled by it.

“I made acknowledgments in everything I wrote.”

“But it would mean you were living on his work?”

“All the interpretations that I made were mine.”

“Does it sound likely behaviour on Professor Palairet’s part — or on yours, as far as that goes?”

“I tell you, it’s what happened.”

Dawson-Hill smoothed back his hair, already smooth.

“I shan’t keep you much longer, Dr Howard. I know this must be rather irksome for you. And the Court has had a tiring day.” It was well past four. The sun, wheeling over the first court, had begun to leak into the further window behind Nightingale’s back, and during the last questions he slipped away from the table and drew another blind.

“Just one final question: when your work was criticised, did you take the advice of any of your scientific colleagues here? Did you take any advice at all?”

“No.”

“You did nothing. You didn’t produce the idea that Professor Palairet was in the habit of providing you with photographs. You didn’t produce that idea for some weeks, if I’m not mistaken. My friend along the table” — Dawson-Hill smiled at me superciliously, affably — “has done his best to make that seem plausible. Tell me now, does it really seem plausible to you ?”

“It’s what happened?”

“Thank you, Master. I’ve nothing more to ask Dr Howard.”

Dawson-Hill leaned back in his chair, elegant, degagé , as though he hadn’t a thought or a care in the world.

“Well,” said Crawford, “as has just been said, we’ve had a tiring day. Speaking as an elderly man, I think we should all do well to adjourn until tomorrow. The members of the Court of Seniors have all had opportunity to question Howard on previous occasions.” (Crawford had been punctilious throughout in calling Howard by his surname alone, as though he were still a colleague.) “I don’t know whether any Senior wishes to ask him anything further now?”

Winslow, eyes reddened, but surprisingly unjaded, said: “I regard that as a question, Master, asked with the particle num .”

“What about you, Eliot?” Crawford said.

During Dawson-Hill’s cross-examination, I had been framing a set of questions in reply. Suddenly, looking at Howard, I threw them out of mind.

“Just this, Master,” I said. I turned to Howard. “Look here,” I said. “There’s been a fraud. You didn’t do it?”

“No.”

“It must have been done, in your view, by Palairet?”

Even then he could not answer straight out. “I suppose so,” he said at length.

“Of anything connected with this fraud you are quite innocent?”

He said, in a high, strangulated tone: “But of course I am.”

As I signalled to Crawford that I had finished, Howard fell back in his chair like an automaton. I felt — as on and off I had felt all day — something so strange as to be sinister. I had heard him speak like that when I believed him guilty. Now, so far as I was convinced of anything about another person, I was convinced that he wasn’t. Yet, listening to him at that moment, I felt not conviction, but mistrust. What he said, although with my mind I knew it to be true, sounded as false as when I first heard it.

BACK in my rooms after the day’s session, I lay on the sofa. On the carpet the angle of the sunbeams sharpened, while I made up my mind. At last I put through two telephone calls: one to the kitchens, to say that I should not dine that evening: the other to Martin, asking him to collect the leaders of the pro-Howard party after hall.

“In my rooms?” said Martin, without other questions. For an instant I hesitated. In college, nothing went unobserved. The news would go round before we had finished talking. Then I thought, the more open the better. This wasn’t a trial-at-law, where an advocate mustn’t see his witnesses. The only tactics left to us were harsh. So, after eating alone, I went to Martin’s rooms in the full, quiet evening light.

As I was going up the staircase, Francis Getliffe followed me, on his way across from the combination room. We entered Martin’s sitting-room together. There Martin was waiting for us, with Skeffington and — to my surprise — Tom Orbell.

It was Tom who asked me first: “How did it go?”

“Badly,” I said.

“How badly?” put in Martin.

“Disastrously,” I said.

As we brought chairs round by the windows, from which one looked westward over the roofs opposite to the bright, not-yet-sunset sky, I told them that Howard was the worst witness in the world. I added that I had been pretty inept myself.

“I find that hard to believe,” said Francis Getliffe.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t much good.”

I went on: “A lot of people would have done it better. But, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about, I’m not sure that anyone would have done the trick. I’ve got to tell you that, as things are and as they look like going, I don’t believe that this man stands a chance.”

In the golden light, Skeffington’s face shone effulgent, radiant, furious.

“That simply can’t be true,” he cried.

“As far as I can judge, it is.”

Skeffington was in a rage, which did not discriminate clearly between Howard, the Seniors and myself. “Are any of us going to wear this? Of course we’re not.”

As for Howard, Skeffington was ready to abuse him too. In fact, I had noticed in Skeffington the process one often sees in his kind of zealot. He was still, as he had been from the day of his conversion, more integrally committed to getting Howard clear than anyone in the college. His passion for giving “that chap” justice had got hotter, not more lukewarm. But as his passion for justice for Howard boiled up, his dislike for the man himself had only deepened. And there was something else, just as curious. For Howard’s sake — or rather, for the sake of getting him fair play — Skeffington was prepared to quarrel with his natural associates in the college: the religious, the orthodox, the conservative. All this on behalf of a man whom Skeffington, not now able to bear him and not given to subtle political distinctions, had come to think of as the reddest of the red. The result of this was to make Skeffington, in everything outside the affair itself, more conservative than he had ever been before. He had taken on a rabid, an almost unbalanced, strain of anti-communism. It was said, I did not know how reliable the rumour was, that he was even having doubts about voting for Francis Getliffe at the magisterial election — after all, Francis had been known to have a weakness for the left.