Charles Snow - The Affair

“I’m damned if I like it,” said Skeffington, “but I’d better do it.”

“I don’t know enough about it, do I?” asked Tom. He was glad to be out of it, and yet half-disappointed.

Of them all, Skeffington was the last I should have selected. He did not carry weight. He had been so much the head and front of the Howard party that men did not listen to him any more. They would just dismiss this as another outburst, and the last.

I gazed at Martin. He would have been far more effective. He shook his head. “No, I can’t go back on what I said. I’ll do anything else I can: but not that.”

Just as I was turning to Skeffington, resigned to making do with him, Francis said, in a tone strained, embittered and forced: “No. I’m the best person to do it.”

Martin looked at him in consternation. They had never been specially fond of each other, but Martin said with a touch of affection, almost protectively: “But it’s not much in your line, you know.”

“Do you think I shall enjoy it?” Francis said. “But they’ll listen to me, and I’m the best person to do it.”

No man would more detest doing it. He was a man so thin-skinned that he didn’t like the ordinary wear and tear of a college argument, much less this. He was less cushioned than the rest of us. Although he had played a part in scientific affairs, he had done so by force of will, not because he fitted in. He had never toughened his hide, as most men do for self-protection, when they live in affairs. He had never acquired the sort of realistic acceptance which I, for example, could switch on. He continued to be upset when men behaved badly.

Yet despite all that, or really because of it, he was, as he said himself, the man the Court would have to listen to. Not only for his name, his seniority, but also because he was a little purer than most men.

Martin asked him to think again, but Francis was impatient.

His decision was made. He didn’t want any more talk. He wanted to do it and get it over. He knew, just as well as the politically minded, Martin and Tom Orbell, what in practical terms he was losing. All of us knew that up to that night he had a clear lead in the magisterial election. By this time next day, he would have lost one vote for sure, possibly more.

In Martin’s room, no one mentioned the election. But I did, later that night. As soon as Francis had said that he was “the best person to do it”, he got to his feet. All of us were constrained. There was some relief, certainly some expectancy in the air, but even a fluent man like Tom couldn’t find any easy words. While they were saying goodnight, Francis asked me if I would care to drive out with him and see his wife.

On our way out to their house, the same house I used to visit when we were young men, we scarcely spoke. I looked from the dashboard to the beautiful grape-dark dusk. Francis, silently driving, was both resentful at the prospect of next day, and also diffident. He had been in authority for so long, sometimes people disliked him for being overbearing, and yet he still curled up inside.

In the drawing-room, as soon as I went in, his wife Katherine cried out with pleasure. When I had first known her, nearly thirty years before, she had been a sturdy pony of a girl; now she was a matriarch. The clear, patrician Jewish features were still there, the sharp, intelligent grey eyes: but she sat statuesque in her chair, a big, heavy woman, her children grown up, massive, slow-moving, indolent, like those aunts of hers, other matriarchs, whom I had met at her father’s dinner-parties when she and I were young. And yet, though the physical transformation was dramatic, though time had done its trick, and she sat there, a middle-aged woman filling her chair — I did not quite, at least not with photographic acceptance, see her so. I did not see her as I should have seen her if I had that night come into her house for the first time, and been confronted with her — as I had been confronted with those great matriarchs of aunts, having no pictures of their past. Somehow anyone whom one has known from youth one never sees quite straight: the picture has been doubly exposed; something of themselves when young, the physical presence of themselves when young, lingers till they die.

We talked about our children. It seemed to her funny that her two eldest should be married while mine was six years old. We talked of her brother, to whom she was, after a break of years, at last reconciled. We talked of her father, who had died the year before. Then I said, in the warmth of associations flowing back: “Katherine, my dear, I’ve just done Francis a bad turn.”

“That’s pretty gross, isn’t it?” She glanced at her husband with her penetrating eyes. “What have you been up to, Lewis?”

“No,” said Francis, “we’ve all got trapped. It’s not his fault.”

“In effect, I’ve done him a bad turn.”

I explained what had happened. She knew all about the affair: she was vehemently pro-Howard. Morally, she had not altered. She still kept the passion for justice, argumentative, repetitive, but quite incorruptible, that I remembered in her and her brother when they were young. At that time, that sharp edged passion had seemed to me to be specifically Jewish: had I ever met non-Jews who felt for justice just like that? But now I had lived with Margaret for years. She had the same passion, just as contemptuous of compromise, as any of my Jewish friends. If Margaret had been present that night, she would have judged the case precisely as Katherine did.

“You hadn’t any option,” she said to Francis. “Of course you hadn’t. Don’t you admit it?”

“No doubt that will comfort me a bit, when it comes to tomorrow afternoon.” Francis, who still loved her, made that gallows-joke as though with her he had managed to relax.

“But it’s an intolerable nuisance. No, it’s worse than that—” I began.

“It’s monstrous to have to make yourself unpleasant in just that way, of course it is,” said Katherine to her husband.

“I meant something less refined,” I put in. The way I spoke recalled to her, as it was meant to recall, a private joke. When I had first entered the great houses in which she was brought up, I had been a poor young man determined to get on. I had had to play down my sensibilities, while she and her friends had been free to indulge and proliferate theirs. So they had made a legend of me, as a sort of Bazarov, unrecognisably monolithic, utterly different from what I really was, and from what they knew me to be. Somehow this legend had lasted half a lifetime: so that Katherine, whose fibres were tougher than mine, sometimes pretended at odd moments that she was a delicate, fainéante relic of a dying class being attacked by someone implacable and raw.

“Much less refined,” I said. “Look, Katherine, if Francis doesn’t become Master next autumn, it will be because of what he’s going to do tomorrow. Perhaps he’ll still get it. But if he doesn’t, it’ll be on account of this business. I want you to realise that I am partly responsible.”

“Why, I suppose he is,” she said to Francis, in a tone I did not understand — angry? sarcastic?

“It’s neither here nor there,” he replied.

“If I’d not spoken as I did tonight—”

“It would have added up to the same thing in the end.”

“Anyway,” I said to Katherine, “I’m sorry it had to be through me.”

She had been gazing at me. Her eyes were keen, appraising. Suddenly she laughed. It was a maternal laugh, a fat woman’s laugh.

“You don’t think I mind all that much, do you? I know the old thing wants it” — she grinned affectionately at Francis — “and of course anything the old thing wants he ought to get. But between ourselves I’ve never really understood why he wants it. He hasn’t done so badly anyway. And it would be an absolutely awful nuisance, don’t you admit it? I don’t mind telling you, I’m not panting to live in any beastly Lodge. Think of the people we should have to entertain. I’m not much good at entertaining. I’m getting too old to put up with being bored. Why should we put up with being bored? Answer me that.”