Charles Snow - The Affair

For a long time Nightingale was obdurate. He had made no allegations against anyone, obstinately he repeated. Dawson-Hill handled him with gentleness and respect. Gradually one could see the lineaments of Nightingale’s face changing in response. But Dawson-Hill did not get the retraction, the total return to the place of efficiency and reason, that he was working for. Later, he was working for another answer which he did not get. He was anxious because Nightingale had admitted to seeing the photograph. How much could Nightingale trust his memory? Couldn’t this particular recollection be wrong? Wasn’t it possible, or even likely, that the photograph was already torn out when the notebook first came under Nightingale’s eyes? Dawson-Hill wanted an open, easy yes. It took him all his time to make Nightingale tolerate the bare possibility.

The open, easy answers came at last, in reply to the last two questions.

“You see nothing to make you believe that Palairet faked any photograph at any time?”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You still believe that Howard was guilty?”

“I believe that,” said Nightingale, in a fierce, daring and tireless tone, “as much as I believe anything.”

Letting down the tightness in the room, Dawson-Hill then asked Crawford about the time-table for the next day, Tuesday. G S Clark had already been told to be ready first thing in the morning. After that, Dawson-Hill presumed, he and I would make our final remarks?

“That sounds reasonable to me,” said Crawford.

That afternoon he had wilted, much more so than Winslow, who spoke next: “My dear Master, I confess the word ‘reasonable’ doesn’t seem to me to be specially appropriate. I seem to remember remarking this morning that, without further mummery, we should reinstate this man. With your permission, may I repeat that?”

“I’m afraid the consensus of opinion this morning was that the hearing should go on,” said Crawford.

“We hadn’t the benefit, I might point out,” Winslow snapped, “of today’s interesting proceedings. I should like to hear others’ views.”

Crawford was going through the motions of presiding.

Nightingale broke in: “You know mine.”

“It is?” Crawford asked.

“It doesn’t need saying. I stick to the Court’s decision.”

“So the Bursar and you,” Crawford said to Winslow, “appear to cancel each other out.”

“Very remarkable,” Winslow replied.

“Brown?”

Crawford turned to his left. All day long Brown had been quiet, quieter than I had ever seen him at a meeting. He had passed no notes to Crawford. Now he said, still sitting back, his expression heavy but his voice practised and level: “I’m inclined to think that we’re gone too far to try to short-circuit things now. This may be a time when it would be a mistake to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar. As for my opinion, Master, I should like to reserve it until Wednesday.”

“Well then,” said Crawford, “we meet tomorrow.” He had suddenly begun to look like an old man. In a tone sharp and petulant, he went on: “I wish I could see more agreement among us. As far as my own opinion goes, I shall attempt to give some indication of it tomorrow afternoon.”

“HE’S all man,” said Irene with glee. She was not talking of a lover, but of her son, away at his preparatory school. She and Martin and I were sitting on their lawn before dinner on the Monday evening. I had not long arrived. Martin, whose face had caught the sun, was lying back in his deck-chair, his hand to his eyes, squinnying towards the bottom of the garden.

Martin also was talking about the boy. He was out of comparison more protective than she was. In the weekly letter home Martin read undertones of trouble, concealed from parents, which she laughed off.

“He’s all man,” she cried. “He’ll be as wild as a hawk, one day. That will be something.”

Martin smiled. Even he, the most cautious of men, did not find the idea unpleasant. As for her, she adored it. I was thinking, Martin’s love for the boy was tenacious, deep, more spontaneous than any other affection he had ever had. She loved the boy too, perhaps as much as Martin did, but in a way that was not in the ordinary sense maternal. She was a good mother; she was conscientious, to an extent that people who had known her in her raffish days could scarcely believe. And yet really she loved the boy looking upwards, not downwards, looking towards the time when he was a man, and would take her out and tell her what to do.

Once, when she was young and chasing a man twice her age, I had heard her squeal with delight and say that she was good at daughtering, not at mothering. It was truer than she thought. Somehow, in her own family, where she looked from the outside a bulky ageing woman, she would feel younger than any of the men.

That was already so in her marriage. In calendar years she was older than Martin: she looked older. But, now they had been married fifteen years, she had come to behave like a daughter to a father, who was wilful, capricious, but who was her one support: to whom under the teasing and the disrespect, she felt nothing but passionate respect.

It seemed to suit them both. Against all the prophecies, against the forecasts of wiseacres like myself, the marriage had worked. As she walked back into the house to put dinner on, stoop-shouldered, thickening, still active and light on her feet, from his chair Martin’s eyes followed her. It was not till then that he asked me about Nightingale. He had kept from her, I felt sure, how he had been more scrupulous, more gentle, than the rest of us. Perhaps he knew that that was an aspect of him, surprising to his friends, surprising even to himself, that she would not wish to see.

“How did Nightingale take it?” As he asked the question, he was puzzled to see me grin. It just happened that his tone had not been at all gentle. Somehow it brought back to mind one of old Gay’s saga men enquiring how some unfortunate hero had faced an ordeal, such as having his house burned over his head.

“Well, how did he take it?” Martin repeated.

I described the day. Martin listened with concentration. He was careful not to say whether he thought Nightingale’s behaviour pointed to guilt or innocence. He was too experienced to worry me with doubts just then. I was in the middle of it; he was not going, even by a fraction, to weaken my will. As usual, he was leaving nothing to chance. It rested with Crawford and Brown now: what were they going to say?

“It ought to be all right,” I said.

Dawson-Hill was dining with Crawford that evening, wasn’t he? Martin asked.

“I don’t know that I like that,” he reflected. He insisted that I ought to see Brown alone on the following, Tuesday, night. After all, Brown was a friend and a good man. Despite all this faction, I could still talk to him as a friend. It might be worth doing. Martin was sure that it was worth doing. I was not eager, but Martin pressed me. Would I mind if he fixed it up straight away? I said that anxiety was running away with him. “Never mind,” said Martin, and went away to telephone.

He returned across the grass with a furtive smile.

“Uncle Arthur wasn’t any keener on it than you are. But he’ll see you in his rooms tomorrow night at nine o’clock.”

After dinner, the four of us were sitting near the window looking out over the wide lawn. On the further side, G S Clark had come down his own steps and was walking near the edge — so that he kept in the full evening sun, out of the shadow of the elms. He was walking slowly, dragging his useless leg. It took him minutes to reach the bottom of the garden, turn, go on with his exercise. Yet his locomotion, though it was painful and laborious, did not look so. There seemed a jaunty, almost wilful air, in the way he pulled up the bad leg and then set off for his next step, as though this wasn’t a very good way to walk, but one that, out of eccentricity, he happened to prefer.