Charles Snow - The Affair

“Is that all right, Dawson-Hill?” Crawford asked, as he put down the paper.

Just for an instant, Dawson-Hill flushed. Then, nonchalantly, with his kind of patrician cheek, he said: “I don’t pretend to be entirely happy about it, Master.”

“If you have anything further to say—?”

“Would that be the slightest use?”

“We are very grateful to you both,” Brown put in, “but I really think we’ve got as far as discussion can reasonably take us.”

“Are you satisfied, Eliot?” Crawford asked.

As I listened, I had felt nothing but elation, savage elation, the elation of victory. But it was a long time since I had heard the singular eloquence of college Orders. It took me a moment to realise that it was not all victory. Like the other research fellows since the war, Howard had been elected for four years. We had assumed that, if he were reinstated, the period of deprivation wouldn’t count against his term. They were counting it, by the simple method of paying him, so that he would slide out as early as the statutes allowed: this device had occurred to no one before.

“When does his Fellowship run out?” I enquired.

Brown, who saw that I had taken the point, replied: “December 13th this year.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re giving him half a loaf.”

“No, Lewis,” said Brown, “we’re giving him a reasonable deal according to our lights. We think we should be ill-advised to give him more.”

“He will, of course,” said Crawford, “still be eligible for an official Fellowship if and when a vacancy crops up. Though I doubt whether it would be in his own best interests to hold out much hope of that.”

Brown spoke to me: “No, Lewis, he’s getting more than half a loaf. He’s getting the substance of what he wants. He won’t have a black mark against him, his Fellowship will have run its course. As for the way we’ve done it, we’re entitled to consider ourselves.”

They all waited. The clock ticked in the silence, as I made up my mind.

“For myself,” I said, “I think I can accept that. But I’m not certain that all the Fellows I am representing will do.”

“They’ll be seriously irresponsible if they don’t,” Brown said. He added in a tone unusually simple and direct: “This isn’t altogether plain sailing, you know. You’ll do your best to persuade them, won’t you?”

Crawford, still relaxed in his chair, inclined his head, not his body, first to the right, then to the left. With a satisfied smile he said: “Well then. That is agreed.”

He went on: “I will now ask the Bursar to enter the Order in the book.” The draft was passed along to Nightingale, who had the order book already opened. He said, as though he were excited, but excited in a not unpleasurable way: “I take it that I enter my own dissent. I don’t know whether anyone’s ever had the chance to do that before!”

Fair hair bent over the book, he dutifully wrote. Winslow, turning away from him, was making remarks sharp with mischief about the resolutions that Nightingale wouldn’t have the “trouble of inscribing”. I got the impression that much of the day Brown had been drawing up forms of words by which the Seniors ruled out most of the evidence, and by inference protected Nightingale: but that when they became specific, Winslow had said that he would enter his dissent; and when they were woolly, Winslow, with some aid from Crawford, had jeered them away. All his life Winslow had loved drafting. This had been his day.

Nevertheless, fighting Brown on those clauses, Winslow and Crawford had given way about Howard’s tenure. That was a compromise, and the more one thought of it the more indefensible it seemed. It wasn’t like Brown, even, though it was his work. He was both too shrewd and also too magnanimous not to know that when one admitted being wrong, one ought to go the whole hog and be generous. I didn’t believe that they were aiming at keeping Howard from voting at the election, though incidentally they would do just that. No, I believed that, in some fashion which, in the future, Brown himself would be hard put to it to disentangle, much less justify, this was an attempt to make a gesture in favour of Nightingale, against the man who, even if he were innocent, had caused the trouble.

Meanwhile, Winslow was expecting Nightingale to resign. Winslow had been brought up in a Cambridge stiff with punctilio, pique and private incomes, and where, when men were criticised, they had a knack of throwing resignations on to the table, as in fact Winslow had done himself. It seemed incredible to him that Nightingale should not resign. Each minute, with relish, the old man was expecting it. I was not. I didn’t doubt that Nightingale, who had still four years to go as Bursar, would finish his term of office down to the last second of the last day. If there were coldness, or something like ostracism, from Winslow and others, he would take that, thickening his carapace, under which he would feel ill-used, perhaps at times persecuted, imagining attacks, becoming offensive in return.

Nightingale finished writing, and placed the book in front of Crawford. I got up, and when they had signed, stood behind them and studied the page. The Order was as Crawford had read it, written in Nightingale’s neat, school-mistressish hand. Underneath were the three signatures, R T A Crawford, MC, G H Winslow, A Brown. At the bottom of the page ran two lines inserted by Nightingale before the others signed: “Dr Nightingale, Bursar of the College and Secretary of the Court of Seniors, wished to have his dissent recorded. Alec Nightingale.”

Everyone was standing up. Nightingale reverentially put a large piece of blotting-paper on top of the order and closed the book. Then he looked out of the window into the gloomy evening and said to no one in particular, with the meteorological interest that never seemed to leave him: “Well, we’ve had the last of the summer.”

The Court, despite the day-long sitting, did not seem anxious to break up. It was the disinclination to part one sometimes sees in a group of men, gathered together for whatever purpose, never mind what the disagreements or inner wars have been. Crawford asked us all if we would like a glass of sherry. While the butler brought in decanter and glasses, Winslow was saying that, as soon as the Long Vacation term began, he must summon the first full pre-election meeting.

“You’ll soon be vanishing into oblivion,” he said to Crawford, with an old man’s triumph, prodding him with his retirement. “You’ll soon be no one at all!”

We stayed and talked. They went on about the timetable of the election, though no one mentioned the candidates’ names. It was nearly seven, and I said that Dawson-Hill and I must soon be off on our mission to old Gay. As I said that, Brown, whom I could not remember ever having seen gesticulate, covered his face with his hand. He had just thought, he said, that under the statutes Gay, as Senior Fellow, still had the prescriptive right to convene the election and to preside at it. “After our experience with him over this business,” said Brown, “how are we going to dare to try and keep him out? How are we going to keep him out at all? I wish someone would answer me that.”

Dawson-Hill was shaking hands all round. As Brown saw us ready to leave, he had another thought. He spoke to Crawford: “If our friends are going out to Gay’s, then I think we ought to send a copy of the Order to Howard himself. I have a feeling that it’s only right and proper.”

It was the correct thing to do; but it was also good-natured. Brown detested Howard, he had behaved to him with extreme prejudice, but he was not the man to see him kept in unnecessary suspense.