Charles Snow - The Affair

“God love my blasted soul!” Tom broke out. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that the man’s a monster? Hasn’t it occurred to you that he’s a ridiculous monster? Look here, I’m a Tory and I suppose you’d say you weren’t. I love my religion and so far as I know, you haven’t got any. But do you want, any more than I do, a man who sees a communist under every bloody bed?”

“Everyone’s got some bee in his bonnet,” said Ince, temperately.

“Well, please enlighten me as to what you do see in him,” Tom went on, beginning to show his silken, unstable courtesy and talking down his nose.

“He’s independent.”

“With great respect, I doubt it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Ince, in his new, stately manner, “I have to take people as I find them. I find him original. I find that he’s not one of anyone’s gang. And I’d like to tell you what a lot of people are thinking nowadays. It’s time we got outside the gangs. We’ve got to keep our eyes open for men who stand on their own. And we shan’t get a man in this college who stands on his own more than G S Clark does.”

“So that’s what you think, is it?” said Tom.

“I should like to hear your opinion of him,” Ince turned to me.

I shook my head. “If I’d been asked to imagine an improbable nomination,” I said, “I couldn’t have imagined one as improbable as that.”

“Look here,” Tom broke out furiously, “I suppose you haven’t given the faintest thought to the consequences, if you go ahead with this spectacular idea? I can tell you, and it’s useless to deny it, things look pretty even just now between Brown and Getliffe. It looks like nine votes certain for Getliffe and seven for Brown, and the others not yet committed. If you go ahead with this spectacular idea, all you’ll achieve is perhaps subtract a vote or two from Brown, including making Clark withhold his own vote. So with classical ingenuity, you will give Getliffe a long lead and probably let him in by default. Which is exactly the result you say you want the least. I suppose you hadn’t thought of those consequences? Or I suppose that isn’t the intention behind your spectacular idea?”

Tom was ready, as usual too ready, to smell out a conspiracy. Ince’s face, up to that point rubbery, benevolent and composed, had taken on a frown.

“I’ve been listening to that kind of talk until I’m sick and tired,” he said. “I’m just not prepared to play. All I’m prepared to do is to pick out the man I think best and say so and stick to it.”

“Thus cleverly producing the consequences that you say you don’t want?”

“Damn the consequences. As for what you’re telling me, there’s only one answer to that.” Suddenly Ince’s stateliness had dropped away. His presidential manners had got lost. He said: “There’s only one answer. Stuff it.”

As they were glaring at each other, the butler came out on to the terrace.

“Mr President,” he said to Ince, “may I have permission to deliver a telephone message?”

“By all means,” replied Ince, shining with sedateness once again.

The butler came to my side, and his clear confidential whisper said: “Dr Nightingale’s compliments, and he would much appreciate it if you could do him the favour of calling in his rooms as soon as you conveniently can tonight.”

WALKING through the third court to Nightingale’s rooms, I was getting ready for a scene I did not like. In the golden pacific air my nerves were sharpened. I felt the mixture of combativeness, irritation and fear. My thoughts were all over the place: I even found myself thinking, with a childish sense of being ill-used, it’s too nice a night to go and have a quarrel.

After the warm, flower-scented court, the staircase, not yet lighted, struck dank as a well. As I climbed to the third floor, the landing was bright, flooded by the sunset. My eyes were dazzled, coming up from the dark floors beneath, and I could scarcely read Nightingale’s name above the door. When I knocked and went in, he had the curtains drawn and both the reading-lamp and an old-fashioned central chandelier switched on. He stood up, and in silence gave me an eager and charming smile.

He asked me to sit down, pointing to the one good armchair in the bare room. There was a church hush.

I was the first to make conversation. I said that I had glanced up at the Bursary expecting to find him there.

“No,” said Nightingale. “I don’t believe in living over the shop.” He went on to say that he had occupied these present rooms ever since he was first elected and added: “And that’s longer ago than I’d care to think. If it comes to that,” he spoke to me civilly, as though we shared a rueful pleasure, “it must be a long time since you were up here last. That must be longer ago than either of us care to think.”

It had, in fact, been before the war. I had only been inside that room twice during the time we were both Fellows. Our relations had made it unlikely that I should visit him. And yet, Nightingale seemed to remember that period, when he was bitterly miserable, when he and I were barely on speaking terms, not sentimentally, not with affection, but with something like respect.

Perhaps he was one of those men, so self-absorbed that everything that has happened to them is precious, who don’t want to dismiss an enemy from their minds, provided they have known him long enough. The bare fact of knowing him long enough gives him some claim upon them. Just then, he was speaking to me — whom he had always regarded as an enemy, that night with specific cause, and who in turn disliked him more than most men — as though we had something in common.

I looked round the room. It was as I dimly recalled it, bleak, both less cosy and less personal than most Fellows’ rooms. An oar, relic of undergraduate rowing, was hung along one wall. On his desk stood a large photograph of his wife, pudgy, amiable, full-eyed, which couldn’t have been there in my time. I noticed on the walls photographs which must also have been recent, groups of officers in the desert. In one Nightingale sat in the middle, wearing shorts and a beret. In another he was placed two from the left of a famous soldier, whom I happened to have met. I asked about him.

“Oh, they’d kicked me upstairs by then,” said Nightingale. “They’d decided I was an old man, and no good for fighting any more.”

It occurred to me, he was oddly modest about his war. He had been a field officer in his mid-forties; I couldn’t think of many amateurs who had done as much. I said that I knew his commander, Lord Gilbey. During the war, stories had collected in Whitehall, among officials not given to hero-worship, about his personal bravery. I asked Nightingale about this.

“Oh, he didn’t much mind being shot at,” he said. He added: “After all, he’s been paid to be shot at all his life, hasn’t he?”

“But still,” I said, “he must have quite abnormal physical courage.”

“I suppose he has,” said Nightingale.

“I must say I envy it.”

“I don’t think you need,” said Nightingale.

Suddenly I realised, what had been at the back of my mind all along, that I was talking of one very brave man to another. Like it or not, one had to admit that Nightingale’s courage in both wars was absolute.

“I’ve seen too much of it to be impressed,” he remarked. “I don’t think you need envy it.” He said it with something like a sneer, but quite kindly. He was not a man with any interest in understanding others: he was too knotted in himself for that. Certainly he had no interest in me, except as one who filled him with resentment. Yet, just for an instant, he seemed to understand me better than if he had been fond of me. He spoke — it was bizarre, in the tension of that evening — as though he were reassuring me.