Charles Snow - The Affair

No, Winslow’s standard of behaviour had nothing special about it. Nor, as far as that went, had the history of his life. It was not in those terms, but below them, that he was interesting.

His life had, of course, been by his own criteria a failure. He was fond of saying so. He explained how, of three inadequate bursars in succession, he had been the worst. He was prepared to expand on his “lifetime of singular lack of achievement”. He believed he was telling the truth. In reality, except when he spoke of his son, living God knows how in Canada, nearly forty and without a job, taking his allowance and never sending a letter, he liked talking about his failure. “I always felt I was slightly less crass than most of my colleagues. And indeed that was not making a superlative claim. Nevertheless, even compared with their modest efforts, I’ve done quite remarkably worse.” Speaking like that, he got the feeling of being unsparing and honest. Yet he wasn’t. As he talked he believed he was a failure: but his fibres told him otherwise.

He had never been easy with men. He had never made close friends. He was both too arrogant and too diffident. And yet, at eighty, he still kept a kind of assurance that many disciplined, matey and, by his criteria, successful men never attain at all. It was the kind of elemental assurance of someone who had after all lived according to his nature. It was the kind of assurance that one meets sometimes in rakes and down-and-outs — very likely, now I came to think of it, in his own son. It was the kind of assurance that both gave, and at the same time derived from, the strongest animal grip on life.

Crawford looked at Brown and said: “I think we must take note that our senior colleague has declared his intentions.”

“If you please, Master,” said Winslow. “ If you please.”

I too had been looking at Brown. He knew, both of us knew, that Winslow would from now on never budge.

“I suppose it is slightly premature for the Court to try to formulate its decision,” said Crawford. He said it with the faintest inflection of a question. From his left hand Brown, for once, did not help him out: Brown sat back, receptive, vigilant, without a word.

Without a word, we all sat there. For an instant I felt triumph. The case had cracked. Then, in a tone slightly harsh but businesslike, Nightingale said: “I should regard it as premature, of course. I totally disagree with almost everything we’ve heard from Mr Winslow. I can’t begin to accept that that is a basis for a decision. I move that proceedings continue.”

At last Brown spoke, steadily and with weight: “I have to agree with the Bursar.”

“In that case,” said Crawford, in resignation, “I’m afraid we come back to you, Eliot.”

Again, before I started speaking, I was interrupted: this time by Dawson-Hill.

“Master, with apologies to my colleague, may I—”

Crawford, who was getting fretful, shut his eyes and nodded his head, like one of the mandarin toys of my childhood.

“I would like to make just one plea,” said Dawson-Hill. “I haven’t the slightest intention of depriving my colleague of an argument on his side of the case. I am sure he knows that I haven’t the slightest intention.” He gave me his groomed, party smile. “But I would like to ask if he can see his way to leaving Sir Francis Getliffe’s statement as it stands. Naturally this statement can’t be ignored by the Court. But with great respect and humility, I do suggest that if my colleague takes it further we face a prospect of getting into situations of some delicacy, without any gain either to his arguments or mine. I’m fully aware that anything said to this Court is privileged. Nevertheless, I do urge on my colleague that we avoid delicate situations where we can. I know he will agree with me, it is quite obviously incontrovertible, that none of Sir Francis Getliffe’s speculations are provable in law. With great respect, I do suggest that we leave them now.”

Again Nightingale was watching me. He was wearing a new butterfly bow, red with white spots, jaunty under the stern masculine jaw. In his eyes the pupils were large. This was the second version of his appeal to me.

I had made my choice long since. I said: “I’m sorry, Master. I can’t present a fair case for Howard with one hand tied behind my back.”

“All right!” It was Nightingale who said it, his voice gravelly. This was the first time violence, open violence, had broken into the room. He was furious, but furious not so much from a sense of danger as because he had been turned down. “Put your cards on the table. That’d be a change for us all.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said — I was playing to provoke him — “I’d rather put Palairet’s notebook on the table.”

“I should like a simple answer to a simple question,” Nightingale cried. “How much of all this is intended for me?”

“I don’t think,” I said, “that the Bursar should conduct my case for me.”

“I’m afraid that’s reasonable,” said Dawson-Hill, sounding both embarrassed and not used to being embarrassed, across the table to Nightingale.

But Nightingale was a daring man. Passions, long banked down, were breaking out of him. They were not, or only in part, the passions of the night before. Then he had spoken to me, an old enemy, with the intimacy that sometimes irradiates enmity. Now he wasn’t speaking to me personally at all. He hated me, but only as one of many. He was speaking as though surrounded by enemies, with himself all set to hack his way out. He had lost his temper: but as with some active men, having lost his temper made him more fit for action, more capable of looking after himself.

“I want to know,” he said, “whether what Getliffe said yesterday was intended for me? Or what this man is telling us this morning?”

Deliberately I did not answer. I asked Crawford if he minded my having Palairet’s notebook open on the table. “Perhaps,” I said, “the Bursar can help me find the place.” I got up from my seat, went round the table behind Crawford, took the notebook and stood with it at Nightingale’s side.

“It’s somewhere near halfway through,” I said. “We ought to have had it tagged.”

Nightingale was watching the leaves as I furled them through. “Later than that,” he said, not pretending that he was lost.

“There it is, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” said Nightingale, gazing carefully at the page but without expression.

Everyone was watching him as he studied the page.

I brought back the open notebook into the centre of the room, and placed it on the table in front of Crawford’s place. The right hand page was numbered in ink, a hundred and twenty-one. The date, also in ink, stood on the left of the top line. Two thirds of the page was empty, except for the trace of gummy paper marking out the sides of a rectangle, where the photograph had been. At the bottom of the rectangle, nearer the middle than the left-hand corner, was a scrap of the print, perhaps a quarter of an inch square. Getliffe and the rest had agreed that this scrap told nothing. Beneath the rectangle, in the bottom third of the page, the caption took up three lines of holograph, in the neat spiky Edwardian script. It was written in pencil, and looked fainter than when I had seen it before. It also looked insignificant, something domesticable that couldn’t cause trouble.

“There, gentlemen,” I said.

I had judged my line by now. I began: “You heard Getliffe give you his opinion yesterday. No one gives that kind of opinion lightly: and you all know Getliffe as well as I do. He said it was possible that the photograph which used to be on this page” — I had put a finger on the notebook — “had been torn out. Not by chance.”