Charles Snow - The Affair

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In the eighth in the
series Donald Howard, a young science Fellow is charged with scientific fraud and dismissed from his college. This novel, which became a successful West End play, describes a miscarriage of justice in the same Cambridge college which served as a setting for
. In the eighth in the Strangers and Brothers series Donald Howard, a young science Fellow is charged with scientific fraud and dismissed from his college. This novel, which became a successful West End play, describes a miscarriage of justice in the same Cambridge college which served as a setting for The Masters.

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Howard was replying to one of his expressions of doubt.

“That’s all very well. But objectively, it’s holding up things. We haven’t got time for that.”

Howard was a shade less pertinacious than his wife. Soon he was telling Pande that he needn’t add his signature until next day. Pande gave a sigh, and with a jubilation of relief, looked round him.

“This is a jolly luxurious flat!” said Dr Pande.

“You’ll sign tomorrow?” said Laura.

“I will talk to you. Perhaps on the telephone,” said Dr Pande, as, very light, very ectomorphic, he went out of the room.

We could hear his footsteps down the stairs. They looked at me.

“Is it all right?” asked Laura.

“No,” I said. “I’ve no comfort to give you.”

Laura flushed with shock. For the first time I saw tears in her eyes. While Howard stood there, his mouth open, not putting a face on it, not aggressive, for once undefiant. But I did not feel protective to either of them. For him I felt nothing at all, except a special kind of bitter irritation. It was the kind of irritation one feels only for someone for whom one has tried to do a good turn and failed: or for someone for whom one has tried to get a job, and who has been turned down.

Laura recovered herself. What had happened? I told them there had been a division on the Court. That was as far as I felt like going or could safely go. Howard pressed me for names, but I said that I couldn’t give them. “Damn it,” he said, “are you an MI5 man?” It seemed to me that he was capable of believing that literally.

The Court would issue its finding the next day, I explained. Laura was back in action. So it wasn’t all settled? So there were still things that might be done?

“Are you doing them?” she cried.

I said that I was doing all I could think of. I did not tell them that I was seeing Brown that night. Their hopes were reviving, despite anything I said. I repeated, I didn’t believe anything I could do was relevant now: I had no comfort to give them.

As soon as I left their flat and got down into the street, I felt an anger which couldn’t find an outlet, a weight of anger and depression such as made the brilliant summer evening dark upon the eyes. I was not angry for Howard’s sake: he remained more an object of anger than its cause. I didn’t give a thought about injustice. No, the thought of Howard, the thought of Laura, the thought of seeing Brown, they were just tenebrous, as though they had added to my rage, but were looked at through smoked glass. There was nothing unselfish, nothing either abstract or idealistic about my anger, nothing in the slightest removed from the frets of self. I was just enraged because I hadn’t got my way.

Slowly I walked by St Edward’s Church and out into the Market Place. I bought a newspaper, as automatically as one of Pavlov’s dogs, at the corner. I went into the Lion, drank a glass of beer, and was staring at the paper.

A thick, throaty voice came from over my shoulder.

“Why, it’s the man himself!”

I looked up and saw Paul Jago, heavy, shabby, smiling.

He asked me to have another drink and, as he sat down beside me, explained that his wife had gone off to a sick relative. It was a long time, he said, since he had walked about the town alone in the evening, or been into a pub. He was studying me with eyes which, through the thick lenses, were still penetrating, in the lined, self-indulgent face.

“Forgive me, old chap,” he said, “am I wrong, or are you a bit under the weather?”

The quick sympathy shot out. Even when he was at his most selfish, one felt it latent in him. Now it was so sharp that I found myself admitting I was miserable. About the Howard case, I said.

“Oh, that ,” Jago replied. Just for an instant his tone contained pride, malice, an edge of amusement. Then it softened again. “I’m rather out of touch about that. Tell me about it, won’t you?”

I did not mind being indiscreet, not with him. I did not even rationalise it by thinking that, as a Fellow entitled to a place on the Court, he had a right to know. I let it all spill out. It seemed natural to be confiding in this ageing, seedy man, with the wings of white hair untrimmed over his ears, with the dandruff on the shoulders of his jacket. Yet we had never been intimates. Perhaps it seemed more natural just because he was seedy, because he had allowed himself to go to waste, had made a cult of failure and extracted out of it both a bizarre happiness and a way of life. It was not only his sympathy that led me on.

He soon grasped what had happened in the Court. His mind was as quick as his sympathy, and, although he had perversely misused it for so long, or not used it at all, it was still acute. About Getliffe’s statement and Nightingale’s answers the day after, he asked me to tell him again.

“I want to be sure,” he said. He gave a curious smile.

It was after half past seven, and I had already told him that I was calling on Brown at nine. He invited me to have dinner at an hotel. When I said that I didn’t want much of a meal, he humoured me. He went back with me to the college, where we called at the buttery and, like undergraduates, came away with loaves of bread, a packet of butter and a large slab of cheese. In my room, Jago greedily buttered great hunks of crusty loaf. At the same time, his eyes lit up, he listened to me repeat in detail what Nightingale had said the day before and what Brown had said that day.

37: Appeal

EATING a crust, butter sliding on to his fingers, Jago listened to me. Although the sun shone outside, in the room it was cool twilight, and the diffused light gave delicacy and sharpness to his face. He did not criticise or doubt. Once or twice he asked for an explication. He nodded. Suddenly he broke out: “Say no if I’m imposing myself—”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you mind if I come with you to see Brown?”

It was a surprise and not a surprise. He was immersed in the drama. I had known that he was wanting to take a part. Was it just good-nature? He was a man of charm: maybe he still, just for an evening out, so to speak, liked proving that the charm wasn’t lost. Or was it remorse, having turned me down before? Remorse, and the self-satisfaction that things would have gone better if the college had been in his hands?

“I’ve got a feeling,” said Jago, “that Arthur Brown might pay some attention to me. We were close, once.”

On the stroke of nine, we walked together over the cobbles at the foot of Brown’s staircase. After the week’s heat, the smell from the wallflowers beneath the ground-floor windows was dusty and dry. When we had climbed the stairs, I went first into the room. Brown’s greeting was friendly, but not open. When he saw Jago behind me, he grimaced with astonishment.

“My dear Paul!” he cried. He crossed the room and shook hands with Jago. “How ever long is it since you’ve been in here?”

“Longer than I like to think,” said Jago lightly. “And I mustn’t come in now on false pretences, must I?”

“What’s this?” But Brown had known as soon as he saw Jago.

“I’m afraid I’ve come to add my representations to Eliot’s, you know.”

“Is that fair?” asked Brown.

“Don’t you think it is?” said Jago, without self-consciousness.

“Anyway,” said Brown, “it’s very good to have you here, whatever you’ve come for.”

Brown’s affection and pleasure were genuine. Tactically, he was on his guard. He did not need teaching that Jago would try to work on him; nor that, without a purpose, Jago would not have come. It was he who warmed to the reconciliation, if that was what it was, not Jago. And yet Brown had watched Jago let himself slip; he had watched him contract out of all human obligations, except one. To Brown, whatever his luck, any indulgence like that was outside his nature. He was a stoic to the bones; whatever tragedy came his way, the King’s government, the college, his relations with his friends, had to be carried on. He disapproved of Jago’s abandonments; he scarcely understood them and in a sense he despised them. (Perhaps he also envied someone who could so totally let his emotions rip?) Further, he knew, no one better, that Jago had turned against him. But none of this, though it might have tinged Brown’s affection for him, had uprooted it. Brown’s affections, in spite of — or more truly, because of — their being so realistic, were more tenacious than any of ours. He could not change them as he did a suit of clothes or a set of tactics. It was a handicap to him, I used to think, as a politician: perhaps the only handicap he had.

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