Charles Snow - The Affair

“Softlee softlee catchee monkey,” said Skeffington.

Quietly, his eyes sharp, Martin explained what they had done. I began to think I had been airy-fairy in my criticism. The more I heard of the story, the more I thought that they had been decent, cautious, hard-headed. When the two men who were asked to enquire into Howard’s work — that is, Nightingale and Skeffington himself — reported to the Master and Seniors that at least one of Howard’s photographs could not be explained in any way other than as a fraud, he had been asked for any defence he wanted to put up. He had been interviewed twice by the Court of Seniors, and each time he had said nothing to the point. Both the Master and Brown had written to him formally, telling him to put his case on paper. He had still produced nothing as a defence: until, quite suddenly, he asked to appear again before the court. Then he announced that he had now decided there had been a fraud, but that the fraud was not his but old Palairet’s.

“Which must have taken some cooking up,” said Skeffington.

At last I could understand some of the eddies of anger. Palairet had just died; as long as most of us could remember, he had been a college worthy. Not that he had visited the place much, even when he was younger. I recalled seeing him at a feast once or twice, twenty years before, when he must have been in his fifties. He had gone off to be a professor at a Scottish university when he was a young man and had stayed there till he died. He had had a long and eminent career, not quite as distinguished as the Master’s, but about on the level of Francis Getliffe’s.

Just then a couple of undergraduates passed by us on the path and Skeffington, his face flushed and authoritative, had to hold himself in. When he could speak, he had got more savage, not less so.

“It’s a bad show,” he said. “Only the worst sort of Red would have done anything like that.”

“Does that come in?” I asked. But my detachment, which usually had an effect on Skeffington, only vexed him more.

“If the man had had anything to keep him straight,” he said furiously, “if he’d had a faith or even had the sort of code you two have, he might have done lots of bad things, but he would never have done that.”

I said that the younger generation in the college were moving to the Right so fast that survivals like myself would soon be left standing outside the gates. Skeffington was not amused. He was a devout Anglo-Catholic, more pious, so I thought, than Tom Orbell, though not so given to protesting his faith. He was also a Tory, as Tom Orbell claimed to be. In fact, my gibe was somewhere near the truth. Most of the young Fellows were conservative, if they were political at all. At high table one heard a good deal of the reactionary apologists Tom and his friends had resurrected, such as De Maistre and Bonald. I did not mind that so much: but I did mind the tone in which Skeffington had just introduced Howard’s politics.

Nevertheless, I thought, as Martin went on explaining, no body of men could have been much more thorough, when it came to investigating the fraud. When Howard made his accusation-cum-defence, the seniors had insisted that, though it was the most improbable anyone could have invented, they must act as though it might be true. The old man’s executors were asked to turn over his working notebooks to the college, which, since he had bequeathed them his entire estate, was within the rules. He had, incidentally, left thirty-five thousand, and Nightingale wanted to put the money into a building fund and call it after him.

“It was a slap in the eye for the family,” said Skeffington. Then I discovered, what was news to me, that his wife was Palairet’s niece.

The notebooks, scientific papers, fragments of researches, had arrived in batches at the Bursary, and after Nightingale and Skeffington had inspected them, were filed in the college archives. If Howard’s story had had any foundation, there would have been signs of faked evidence in some of the old man’s recent notebooks: all the scientists were certain of that. There was no such sign. Not only Skeffington and Nightingale, but also Francis Getliffe and Martin, and those who worked in related subjects, had gone through the notebooks. Each one of the old man’s diffraction photographs, taken either by himself or his collaborators, had been studied millimetre by millimetre.

“It was about as likely we should find anything wrong,” said Skeffington, “as that any of us would be nabbed in the buttery lifting a case of whisky.”

To him there was no doubt. All that search had seemed disrespectful to the dead. It was to his credit, I thought, that he had worked as scrupulously as anyone. I also thought, once again, that no body of men I knew of would have been more punctilious and fair.

ONE night in December, not long before Christmas, the telephone rang in the drawing-room of our flat. My wife answered it. As she listened, she looked puzzled and obscurely amused.

“Won’t I do?” she asked. She went on: “Yes, I can get him if it’s really necessary. But he’s very tired. Are you certain it can’t wait?”

For some time the cross-talk went on. Then Margaret raised an eyebrow and held the receiver away from her. “It’s Mrs Howard,” she said. “I’m afraid you’d better.”

Down the telephone came a strong, pleasant-toned, determined voice.

“This is Laura Howard. Do you remember that we met one night in Tom Orbell’s club?”

I said yes.

“I’m really asking if you can spare me half an hour one day this week?”

I said that I was abnormally busy. It was true, but I should have said it anyway. Somewhere in her tone there was an insistent note.

“I shan’t keep you more than half an hour, I promise you.” I began reciting some of my engagements for the week, inventing others.

“I can manage any time that suits you,” her voice came back, agreeable, not at all put off.

I said that I might be freer after Christmas, but she replied that “we” were only in London for a short time. She went on: “You were in Cambridge a few weeks ago, weren’t you? Yes, I heard about that. I do wish I’d had a chance to see you there.”

She must, I thought, have revised her first impression of me. Presumably she had made enquiries and people had told her that I might be useful. I had a feeling that she didn’t in the least mind her judgment being wrong. She just wiped the slate clean, and resolved to chase me down.

Margaret was smiling. She found it funny to see me overborne, cut off from all escape routes.

Aside, I said to her: “What in God’s name ought I to do?”

“You’re under no obligation to spend five minutes on her, of course you’re not,” said Margaret. Then her face looked for a second less decorous. “But I don’t know how you’re going to avoid it, I’m damned if I do.”

“It’s intolerable,” I said, cross with her for not keeping her sense of humour down.

“Look here,” said Margaret, “you’d better ask her round here and get it over. Then you’ve done everything that she can possibly want you to.”

That was not quite so. Laura was also set on having me meet her husband. Since his dismissal, she told me over the telephone, he had been teaching in a school in Cambridge: that was the reason he could not often get to London. In the end, I had to invite them both to dinner later that same week.

When they arrived, and I looked at Howard for the first time — for now I realised that I had not once, visiting the college while he was still a Fellow, so much as caught sight of him — I thought how curiously unprepossessing he was. The skin of his face was coarse and pale; he had a long nose and not much chin. His eyes were a washed-out blue. He had a long neck and champagne-bottle shoulders; it was a kind of physique that often went with unusual muscular strength, and also with virility. Somehow at first sight he would have struck most people as bleak, independent, masculine, even though his voice was high-pitched and uninflected. As he spoke to me, he seemed awkward, but not shy.