Charles Snow - The Affair

The instant Crawford called on him, he began speaking, quick on the uptake, sounding quite casual. “This is extremely interesting, Sir Francis,” he said, allowing himself a few seconds to make up his mind. Then he went on as though he had decided to take the risk. The notebook — Dawson-Hill kept referring to it, eyebrows stretched, as “this famous notebook”. How much could Sir Francis help the Court about its history?

“I know no more than the Court does,” said Francis.

Did Francis know anything of Palairet’s habits or about how he’d kept his notebooks?

“I never even visited his laboratory.”

Sensibly, Dawson-Hill was skipping the question about legal proof. When the old man died, all his papers had been sorted out by his executor?

“So far as I know,” said Francis.

Dawson-Hill glanced at Nightingale, who nodded.

The executor was himself an old man, a clergyman? And he had sent them, with long intervals between, in batches to Palairet’s solicitors? The famous notebook being in the last batch? And the solicitors had passed each batch in turn to the college?

As he asked these questions, Dawson-Hill was leaving gaps for the Seniors to break in. He was feeling his way, sensing how far he could safely go. If he gave them the lead, and one of them asked Francis just where and how he believed the photograph had been tampered with, then everything was on the table.

“And so the notebook arrived at the college?”

Francis said, “Of course.”

Dawson-Hill looked across the table at the Court. Winslow was listening, hand propping up his jaw. Crawford sucked at his pipe. Brown sat back in his chair, firm and patient. Nightingale met Dawson-Hill’s gaze. None of them volunteered a word.

Dawson-Hill had to make his decision. He could force the confrontation now — who had seen the notebook in the college? First Nightingale, then Skeffington, wasn’t it? And so, what was Sir Francis Getliffe intending to say?

For any fighting lawyer, it was a temptation. But Dawson-Hill, trying to get the sense of the Court, felt that he mustn’t fall into it. He drew back and went off on to an innocuous question. If I had been in his place I should have done just the same.

But, as he asked questions about Francis’ opinion of Howard, he made what seemed to me a mistake in judgment, the first he had made since the hearing began. Francis had said that Howard’s actions had been those of an “innocent and not very intelligent man”. Dawson-Hill went in for some picador work. Was that really Francis’ opinion? How long had it been so? Presumably he had not always thought Howard innocent? Not, in fact, until quite recently? Presumably, also, he had not always thought him “not very intelligent”? When he supported him for his Fellowship, he could scarcely have considered him not very intelligent? Francis’ estimates, both on character and ability, appeared to vary rather rapidly?

It would not have mattered that these questions were irrelevant. It did matter, or at least I thought it might, that Dawson-Hill let his temper show. Some of that temper came, of course, from pique. Until Francis spoke out that afternoon, Dawson-Hill had been certain that he had won. Now, looking round the uneloquent faces, he couldn’t guess the end, but at least it was all to play for.

Yet there was something deeper than pique that made him more supercilious, sharpened the edge of his voice, drew him into addressing Francis with irritation as Sir Francis, with the accent on the title, as though Dawson-Hill had suddenly changed from an upper-class Englishman into a Maltese. It was deeper than pique, it was sheer dislike of Francis. For Dawson-Hill, despite his snobbisms and although he accepted the world, had a curious streak of emotional egalitarianism. He didn’t like seeing people too miserable, and on the other hand he became irritated when he saw others in his view too well-endowed. He got on better with sinners than with the high-principled. He liked men best who were battered by life, had some trouble on their minds, were still high-spirited and preferably short of money. To him, Francis was a living provocation. He was too scrupulous, too virtuous: he was too conscientious, too far from common clay; he had done altogether too well; he had had success in everything he touched; he had even married a rich wife and had abnormally gifted children. Dawson-Hill could not bear the sight of him.

So Dawson-Hill, for once in his suave career, lost his temper. There was also a perceptible surge of temper on Francis’ side. Francis, much nearer common clay than Dawson-Hill supposed, had a good robust healthy appetite for disliking those who disliked him. Further, he had no use for men as elegant as Dawson-Hill, as beautifully dressed, as youthful-looking, men whom he dismissed as flâneurs .

Their exchanges became more caustically smooth from Dawson-Hill, more contemptuous and impatient from Francis. I saw Brown peering at them both. He began to write on the paper in front of him.

“Sir Francis,” Dawson-Hill was asking, “don’t you agree that Dr Howard, whose character you have praised so generously, showed a really rather surprising alacrity in accepting his professor’s data?”

“I see nothing surprising in it.”

“Should you say it was specially admirable?”

“It was uncritical.”

“Shouldn’t you say it was really so uncritical as perhaps to throw some doubt on his moral character?”

“Certainly not. A good many stupid research students would have done it.”

“Do you really think it specially creditable?”

“I didn’t say it was creditable. I said it was uncritical.”

Just then Brown had finished writing his note. He placed it carefully on top of Crawford’s pad. Crawford looked down, scrutinised the note, and, as Dawson-Hill was beginning another question, cleared his throat: “I think there may be a measure of feeling among my colleagues,” he said, “that this might be as far as we can usefully go this afternoon. Speaking as Master, I’m inclined to suggest that we adjourn.”

Winslow inclined his head. Crawford then asked Brown if he agreed, as though Brown’s note had had no more effect on his, Crawford’s, action than if it had been a love-poem in Portuguese.

“I am also inclined to suggest,” Crawford said, once more as though the idea had occurred to him out of the blue, “that this is a point where the Seniors might spend a little time gathering the threads together. I think it might be convenient if you let me provide you with tea in the Lodge—” He looked along his side of the table, from Winslow to Nightingale. “So shall we let Eliot and Dawson-Hill off for the rest of the afternoon?”

There was a murmur. There were ritual thanks from the Master to Francis Getliffe. Then the Seniors, led by Crawford, filed through the inner door of the combination room into the Lodge.

That left Dawson-Hill, Francis and me alone together. Not one of us could find a word to say. For an instant, Dawson-Hill’s social emollience had left him quite. As for me, it was a long time since I had felt so awkward. Heavy-footedly, I asked if he would be dining in hall. “Alas, no,” he said, getting back into his social stride, telling me the house where he was going.

Francis said to me that he would see me before I returned to London. Nodding to Dawson-Hill, he left the room. I went out after him, but I did not want to catch him up. I did not want to speak to anyone connected with the affair. I walked quickly through the court, beating it to the shelter of my rooms.

I knew well enough what I was doing. It did not look like it, but I was touching wood. People thought that I was cautious and wary, easily darkened by the shadows of danger ahead. So I was. But also, all my life, I had been capable of being touched by too much hope, and in middle age I was so still. In fact, as I grew older, some of my inner weather reminded me more and more of my mother’s. She too had been anxious and had over-insured: over-insured literally, in her case, so that years after her death I kept coming across pathetic benefits she had taken out in my name, with the Hearts of Oak and the other insurance companies, into which she, like the poor of her time, paid her pennies a week.