Charles Snow - The Affair

IN the taxi, along the Madingley Road, through the dense, grey, leafy evening, Dawson-Hill sat with an expression impatient and miffed. He did not like losing any more than most people; he was bored by having to visit Gay.

“Well, you’ve got away with it, Lewis,” he observed.

“Wasn’t it right that I did?”

But Dawson-Hill would give no view about Howard’s innocence. He went on talking in an irritated, professional tone.

“I must say,” he said, “you played it very skilfully on Monday morning. I don’t see how you could have got away with it unless you’d used that double-play. You’d obviously got to raise the dust about Nightingale and give them an escape-route at one and the same damned time. Of course, if you’d gone all out against Nightingale, it would have been absolutely fatal for your chap. That stood to sense. But still, I must say, you did it very neatly.”

He added: “You’ve always been rather lucky, haven’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“My dear Lewis, people say you always have the luck.” He broke off: “By the way, I confess I think Nightingale’s had a rough deal. The one thing that sticks out a mile to my eye is that he’s as blameless as a babe unborn.”

The trees, the garden hedges went by. I had been thinking, how odd it was if acquaintances thought one lucky. It was the last thing anyone ever thought about himself.

Then, sitting complacently back, tired and smug with winning, I heard what Dawson-Hill said of Nightingale. Could it be true? All my instincts told me the opposite. Sitting back, I let in only the trickle of the question, could it be true? If so, it was one of the sarcasms of justice. One started trying to get a wrong righted; one started, granted the human limits, with clean hands and good will; and one finished with the finite chance of having done a wrong to someone else. And yet, in the taxi, windows open to the chilly, summer-smelling wind, it was I who was smug, not Dawson-Hill.

He was enquiring what nonsense we should have to listen to from old Gay. How long would he keep us? Dawson-Hill could not miss his train, Gay or no Gay, senile old peacocks or no senile old peacocks. Dawson-Hill had to be in London for a late-night party. He told me the names of the guests: all very smart, all reported with that curious mixture, common to those who love the world, of debunking and being oneself beglamoured. It was remarkably tiresome, he said, to have to endure old Gay.

The taxi went up the drive. As Dawson-Hill and I stood on the steps of the house, he said, like the German officers on the night the war began: “ Nur fang es an .”

The housekeeper came to the door. Her first words were: “I am so sorry.” She looked distressed, embarrassed, almost tearful. She said: “I am so sorry, but the Professor is fast asleep.”

Dawson-Hill laughed out loud, and said, gently and politely: “Never mind.”

She went on, in her energetic, Central European English, “But he had been looking forward to it so much. He has been getting ready for you since tea-time. He was so pleased you were coming. He had his supper early, to be prepared. And then he goes to sleep.”

“Never mind,” said Dawson-Hill.

“But he will mind terribly. He will be so disappointed. And I dare not wake him.”

“Of course you mustn’t,” said Dawson-Hill.

She asked if we would like to see him, and took us into the study. The room was so dark it was hard to see anything: but there Gay lay back in his chair, shawl over his shoulders, beard luminescent in the vestigial light, luminous white against the baby-clear skin. His head was leaned against the sidewing of the chair. His mouth was open, a dark hole, but he was not snoring. With all of us dead silent, we could hear his breaths, peaceful and soothing.

We tiptoed out into the hall. “What is to be done?” said Dawson-Hill.

We could leave the copy of the Order with a note signed by us both, I said.

“He will be so disappointed,” said the housekeeper. Tears were in her eyes. “He will be heart-broken like a little child.”

“How long before he wakes?” asked Dawson-Hill.

“Who can tell? When he has what he calls his ‘naps’ in the evening, it is sometimes one hour, sometimes two or three.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs Nagelschmidt,” said Dawson-Hill, “I will stay.”

She flushed with happiness. He had remembered her name, he was so polite, and all was well. I said it was very hard on him: I would volunteer myself, but I was dining with my brother, and afterwards might have to do some persuasion with the Howard faction.

“That’s important,” said Dawson-Hill. “No, you can’t possibly stay. It’s all right, I will.”

“And your party?”

“I suppose,” said Dawson-Hill to the housekeeper, “I may telephone, mayn’t I?”

“You shall have everything,” she cried. “You shall sit in the drawing-room. I will make you a little dinner—”

I asked how he was going to get back to London. He said that he would have to hire a car.

It was pure good-nature. Half an hour before, we had seen Brown’s good-nature; that one took for granted, it fitted deep into his flesh and bone. But Dawson-Hill’s came as a shock. I remembered the stories of his good turns to young men at the Bar, done secretively, and with his name kept out. Those stories, whenever I met him and heard his prattle, I only half believed. Now I broke out: “You’re a very kind man, aren’t you?”

Dawson-Hill coloured from hairline to collar. He was delighted to be praised, and yet for once uncomfortably shy. His face seemed to change its shape. The lines, which as a rule ran downwards, giving him his air of superciliousness and faint surprise, suddenly went horizontal, broadening him out, destroying his handsomeness. He looked like a hamster which has just filled its cheek-pouches, shifty, but shining with chuff content. In a manner as gauche as an adolescent’s, he said, in a hurry: “Oh, I don’t think we’d better talk about that.”

WHEN I got to Martin’s house, Margaret was there to welcome me. She had come up to take me home next day. She was bright-eyed because we had won; she wanted nothing except for us to be by ourselves. Irene was yelping with general irreverent glee: the room was warm, swept by currents of slapdash content.

But Margaret was bright-eyed, not only with joy, but with a kind of comic rage. Within five minutes of her arriving at the house — so they told me — Laura had been on to her by telephone. The Seniors’ decision was an outrage: of course Donald’s tenure ought to be prolonged by the entire period during which he had been deprived. Would Margaret see that that was done? and would she also sign a letter which, when Margaret mentioned it, I recognised as the one they had been forcing upon Dr Pande?

“It may be a perfectly reasonable letter,” cried Margaret. “But I’m sick and tired of being pestered by that awful woman.”

“I thought you got on rather well with her?” said Martin, with a glint of malice.

“That’s what you think,” Margaret said. “I’ve had more of her than I can stand. What’s more, I don’t believe, as some of you do, that she’s under her husband’s thumb. I believe she’s the bloodiest awful specimen of a party biddy, and I never want to see her again as long as I live.”

On the tenure of Howard’s Fellowship also, Margaret’s conscience had worn thin. She would have struggled to the last to get him justice. But she did not see, she was saying happily, still pretending to be irascible, why he should get more. The way he had done his research, his lack of critical sense, his taking his professor’s evidence — that wasn’t even second-rate, it was tenth-rate. The man was no good. He ought to count himself lucky to get what the Seniors were giving him: he ought to count himself lucky and keep quiet.