Charles Snow - The Affair

While at the same time, more superstitious each year she lived (and I believed that in my fibres the same was true of me), she invented formulae for good-luck every week, as she filled in her forms for the competitions in John Bull, Titbits and Answers . She had hours and days astrologically chosen, in which to write her great bold clumsy words: and another lucky hour in which to post the envelopes. She used to take me to the pillar-box when I was a child. I would hear the envelope flap-thud into the dark: and then she would look at me, and I knew that in her heart she had already won the prize. “When our ship comes home,” she would say, and at once sternly warn me about “counting our chickens before they were hatched”. With an air of harsh realism, she told me that we mustn’t expect the first prize every week. Yet she not only expected it; as she warned and reproved me for too much hope, she was simultaneously working out the ways to spend it.

I was very like her. It sometimes seemed to me that it was the anxious, the far-sighted, the realistic, who were most susceptible to hope. Certainly I could still be drunk with it. And the word “still” really had no meaning. In middle age I was invaded by hopes exactly as I had been as a young man. No one had learned more about the risks, the probabilities, the realistic expectations of careers: and yet, in secret moments, I had learned nothing. For a long time, as I came to know more about myself, I had developed strategies to protect me and others from these surgent moments which — in their own existence, their own euphoria — I could not suppress.

By myself that evening, therefore, I would not allow a thought to stray towards the case. If I did so, I should just feel that it was in the bag. Much more I wished to avoid meeting Martin or Skeffington, above all the Howards. If I did so, I should warn them how, in situations like this, anything could still happen. In the words I used, in the reasons I gave for staying in suspense, few people would be more guarded. And yet beneath the words there would be a feeling which completely contradicted them, and anyone who heard me would know it. It didn’t take a perceptive person, as I had learned to my own and others’ cost, to catch and believe the tone of irresponsible hope.

So I kept to myself, had a bath, took a book out into the garden and read till dinner time. When I arrived in the combination room I found, and was glad to find, that none of the principals was dining. Winslow, still in the Lodge, so the butler told me, had just sent word for them to strike his name off the list. Tom Orbell was the only partisan whose name was there. As soon as he entered he said, seeing me alone, “How is it going now?”

“Oh, it’s still early days,” I said in a judicious, reproving tone, the model of a middle-aged, responsible, experienced man, a man with a public face.

I did not let him say any more about the affair, and no one else wished to. It was a small party, and a very young one. When Tom picked up the list, and noticed that Lester Ince was presiding, he said: “Now that isn’t exactly my idea of the douceur de la vie .”

Two or three of the young Fellows came in, among them Ince, who, turning upon me a bland, benevolent and ceremonious gaze, said: “I’m very pleased that you’re able to be with us tonight. We’re all very pleased.”

It might have been the Master or Brown speaking. For an instant, Tom Orbell and I were taken by surprise. It even occurred to me that Ince was mimicking. But he was just feeling his position as senior of those present. He addressed me in full: he did not feel it right to call me “Lew”. He knew that he was in the chair, and he had set himself to make a proper job of it.

Dinner proceeded with decorum. After the meal was over he announced: “I think I should like to present a bottle to mark the first time that I have presided in this room.”

Nothing could be more stately. On hot summer nights like this, it was a college custom to go on to the terrace outside the combination room, sit on a balustrade abutting the Master’s garden, and drink white wine. In his less reverential moods, I had heard Lester Ince object to this practice, on the simple but severe grounds that sitting on stone gave him piles, and that white wine was better described as cat’s piss. Not so that night. He led the way on to the terrace, planted a firm, masculine, Trollopian backside on the balustrade, proposed his first toast in Barsac and inclined his head gravely, with ceremonial pleasure, when Tom Orbell toasted him as donor of the wine.

Looking up, one saw, over the roof of the hall, the sky so densely blue that it seemed tangible. The air was quiet. As five of us sat there on the terrace it was — especially to me, basking in it — the most placid of evenings.

Two of the young men got up to go.

“Must you leave us?” said Ince.

They said they had work to do.

“We shall miss you,” said Ince, as a kind of presidential blessing. With disappointment he looked at Tom Orbell, the only Fellow left. “I was going to ask them, I thought tonight was a good night for it, isn’t it time we really began to think about this election?”

He meant, of course, the magisterial election. To Tom, who had been thinking of it for a couple of years past, the question seemed astonishingly cool.

“I suppose we ought to pay some attention to these things. It’s our own fault if we’re too lazy and then find that other people have been ganging up. It’s a bore, but we probably ought to get hold of things and put some weight behind them. We’d better see that we get something sensible done.”

It appeared as though he had been preparing for this speech as soon as he found that he was senior for the night. I was thinking how, like most apolitical men, he thought politics were very easy. He didn’t see any complexities about them. For him, it was just the righteous but inert against the unrighteous but active. If only he and other men of good will applied themselves, all would come right.

It was an approach that could scarcely have been less endearing to Tom Orbell, who wrote about politics, whose dream-life was a politician’s, and who, except in his persecuted moments, knew by instinct what the texture of politics was like.

Tom looked flushed and cross. In the warm evening, beads of sweat were standing out above his temples, where the hair-line was going back.

“I think,” he said, at his most mellifluous, “that there is something obviously sensible to be done. But then, I’ve always declared my interest.”

Sitting dignified between us, Ince did not pretend, as in his more intransigent turns, not to comprehend the phrase.

“Who are you thinking of, then?” he said.

“I’ve made it quite clear, I should have thought,” replied Tom Orbell. “I’m voting for Arthur Brown.”

“No,” Ince reflected. “I don’t think I want him.”

“But why ever not? He’s—”

“He’s been here a bit too long,” said Ince. “No, we’ve got to take some action before things go too far.”

“Don’t you realise,” Tom asked, with an expression of ‘God give me patience’, “that things have gone pretty far already? Don’t you realise that it’s a moral certainty that it’s going to be either Brown or Getliffe—”

“No, I won’t have Getliffe,” remarked Ince, as though that settled it.

“Why not?” I put in.

“I won’t have a scientist,” said Lester Ince. “I’ve got quite a different idea—”

“Who is it?” cried Tom.

Ince gave us a long, slow, subtle, satisfied smile. “G S Clark.” He sat back, with the confidence of M. de Norpois mentioning the name of Giolitti, with the modest expression of an elder statesman who has produced the solution, obvious but so far concealed from others of less wisdom, out of his hat.