A few weeks after the evening in Tom Orbell’s club, I was sitting in my brother’s rooms in college. It was a routine visit: I had gone down, as I did most years, for the Michaelmas audit feast. It gave me a curious mixture of comfort and unfamiliarity to be sitting there as a guest; for I had once used that great Tudor room as my own dining-room, and had sat talking in it as I now sat talking to Francis Getliffe, on October nights like this one, with draughts running under the wainscot, the fire in the basket grate not quite hot enough to reach out to the window seats.
In the study next door, my brother was interviewing a pupil, and Francis Getliffe and I were alone. He was a couple of years older than I was, and we had known each other since we were young men. I could remember him thin-skinned, conquering his diffidence by acts of will. He still looked quixotic and fine featured; his sunburned flesh was dark over his collar and white tie. But success had pouched his cheeks a little and taken away the strain. In the past few years the success which he had wanted honourably but fiercely as he started his career, and which had not come quickly, had suddenly piled upon him. He was in the Royal Society and all over the world his reputation was as high as he had once longed for it to be. In addition, he had been one of the most effective scientists in the war. It was for that work, not his pure research, that he had been given the CBE whose cross he wore on his shirtfront. For a combination of the two he had, two years before, been knighted.
He was chatting about some of our contemporaries who also had done well. He would always have been fair about them, because he had a strict code of fairness: but now, it occurred to me, he was just a shade more fair. He was showing that special affection which one who has in his own eyes come off feels towards others who have done the same.
Martin came in through the inside door. He had changed before his tutorial hour, and was already dressed for the feast. Straight away he began to ask Francis’ advice about the pupil he had just been seeing: was he, or was he not, right to change from physics to metallurgy? Martin worried away at the problem. He had recently become junior tutor, and he was doing the job with obsessive conscientiousness. He enjoyed doing it like that.
Unlike Francis, whose prestige had been rising for years past, Martin’s had been standing still. A few years before, he had had the chance of becoming one of the atomic energy bosses. He had got the chance, not through being a scientist in Francis’ class, which he never could be, but because people thought he was hard, responsible and shrewd. They were not far wrong: and yet, to everyone’s surprise, he had thrown up the power and come back to the college.
He did not seem to mind having a future behind him. With the obsessive satisfaction with which he was now speaking of his pupil’s course, he applied himself to his teaching, to the bread-and-butter work that came his way. He looked very well on it. He was getting on for forty, but he might have passed for younger. As he spoke to Francis, his eyes were acute, brilliant with a kind of sarcastic fun, although everything he said was serious and business-like.
Then he mentioned another pupil called Howarth, and the name by chance plucked at something at the back of my mind to which, since it happened, I had not given a thought.
“Howarth, not Howard?” I said.
“Howarth, not Howard,” said Martin.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I heard something about your ex-colleague Howard. In September young Orbell introduced me to his wife.”
“Did he now?” said Martin, with a tight smile. “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”
“She was crying out loud that there had been a miscarriage of justice. I suppose that’s all nonsense, isn’t it?”
“Quite nonsense,” said Martin.
Francis said: “There’s nothing in that.”
“She seemed to think that he’d been turned out because of some sort of prejudice, which I never got quite clear–”
“That’s simple,” said Francis. “He was, and I suppose he still is, a moderately well-known fellow-traveller.”
“He wouldn’t be the favourite character of some of our friends, then, would he?”
“If I’d thought that was deciding anything, I should have made a noise,” said Francis. “I needn’t tell you that, need I?”
He said it stiffly, but without being touchy. He took it for granted that no one who knew him, I least of all, would doubt his integrity. In fact, no one in his senses could have done so. In the ’30s, Francis himself, like so many of his fellow-scientists, had been far to the left. Now he was respectable, honoured, he had moved a little nearer to the centre, but not all that much. In politics both he and Martin remained liberal and speculative men, and so did I. It was a topic on which the three of us in that room were close together.
“I don’t want to give you a false impression,” Francis said. “This man was disliked inside the college, of course he was, and there’s no getting away from it, with most of them his politics made them dislike him more. But that wasn’t the reason why we had to throw him out. It was a reason, if you like, why we found it difficult to get him elected in the first place. We had to be pretty rough with them, and tell them that politics or no politics, they mustn’t shut their eyes to an Alpha man.”
“In which,” said Martin, “we don’t seem to have done superlatively well.”
Francis gave a grim smile, unamused.
“No,” he said, “it’s a bad business. He just went in for a piece of simple unadulterated fraud. That’s all there is to it.”
So far as he could make it intelligible to a layman, Francis told me about the fraud. A paper of Howard’s, published in collaboration with his professor, an eminent old scientist now dead, had been attacked by American workers in the same field – and the attack had said that the experimental results could not be repeated. Francis and some of his Cavendish colleagues had had private warning that there was something “fishy” about Howard’s published photographs. Two of the scientists in the college, Nightingale and Skeffington, had had a look at them. There was no doubt about it: at least one photograph had been, as it were, forged. That is, a photograph had been enlarged, what Francis called “blown up”, to look like the result of a totally different experiment: and this photograph became the decisive experimental evidence in Howard’s Fellowship thesis and later in his published paper.
The fraud could not be accidental, said Francis. Neither he nor Martin had worked on Howard’s subject, but they had looked at the photograph. It was only too straightforward. The technical opinion that Nightingale and Skeffington had given was the one that any other scientist would have had to give, and it was on this technical opinion that the Court of Seniors had acted. The Court of Seniors, so Francis and Martin told me, had been the Master, Arthur Brown, old Winslow, and Nightingale, this time in his capacity as Bursar. “Of course,” said Francis, “they had to go on what the scientists told them. Nightingale’s the only one of them who’d have any idea what a diffraction photograph was.
“Still,” he added, “they went into it very thoroughly. If it hadn’t been a clear case, they would still have been at it.”
Somehow a question of mine set him reflecting on other cases of scientific fraud. There hadn’t been many, he said, less even than one might expect. Considering the chances and the temptation, the number was astonishingly low. In the last fifty years, he could tick off the notorious ones on the fingers of two hands. He produced names at which Martin nodded, but which, of course, meant nothing to me. Rupp, the J-phenomenon (“but that, presumably, was an honest mistake”): Francis spoke of them with the incredulous relish which professional scandals often evoke in a hyper-scrupulous man. He was wondering about the motives of those who perpetrated them, when the college bell started clanging for the feast.
As we picked up our gowns and went downstairs into the court, Francis was saying: “But there’s no mystery why Howard did it. He just wanted to make his marble good.”
Sitting in hall in the candlelight, I let the story drift comfortably out of mind. It was over and tied up now, and the college was going on. I was enough of a stranger to draw an extra pleasure out of being there. I was also enough of a stranger to be put up on the dais among the old men. This was not such a privilege as it looked: for my next-door neighbour was so old that the places beside him were not competed for.
“Ah,” he said, gazing at me affably. “Excuse me. Do you mind telling me your name?”
The colour in his irises had faded, and they were ringed with white. Otherwise he did not show the signs of extreme age: his cheeks were ruddy pink, his hair and beard silky but strong.
I said that I was Lewis Eliot. It was the second time since dinner began that he had asked the question.
“Indeed. Tell me, have you any connection with the college?”
It was too embarrassing to tell him that we had been Fellows together for ten years. This was M H L Gay, the Icelandic scholar. In his presence one felt as though confronted by one of those genealogical freaks, as I once felt when I met an old lady whose father, not as a boy but as a young man, had been in Paris during the French Revolution. For Gay had been elected a Fellow over seventy years before. He had actually retired from his professorship before Tom Orbell and half a dozen of the present society were born. He was now ninety-four: and in a voice shaky, it is true, but still resonant, was loudly demanding a second glass of champagne.
“Capital. Ah. That’s a drink and a half, if ever there was one. Let me persuade you, sir” – he was addressing me – “to have a glass of this excellent wine.”
He began to speak, cordially and indiscriminately, to all around him: “I don’t know whether you realise it, but this is positively my last appearance before my annual hibernation. Indeed. Yes, that is a prudent measure of mine. Indeed it is. I adopted that prudent measure about ten years ago, when I had to realise that I was no longer as young as I used to be. So after this splendid audit feast of ours, I retire into hibernation and don’t make the journey into college until we have the spring with us again. That means that I have to miss our fine feast for the Commemoration of Benefactors. I have suggested more than once to some of our colleagues that perhaps the summer might be a more opportune time for that fine feast. But so far they haven’t taken the hint, I regret to say.”
For an instant his face looked childish. Then he cheered up: “So I retire to my own ingle-nook for the winter, indeed I do. And I listen to the great gales roaring over the Fens, and I thank God for a good stout roof over my head. Not one of those flat roofs these modern architects try to foist off on us. A good stout pitched roof, that’s what a man wants over his head. Why, one of those flat roofs, our Fenland gales would have it off before you could say Jack Robinson.”
A few places along the table, a distinguished Central European architect was listening. “I do not quite understand, Professor Gay,” he said, with a serious, puzzled and humourless expression. “Are you thinking of the turbulent flow round a rectangle? Or are you thinking of the sucking effect? I assure you–”
“I am thinking of the force of our Fenland gales, sir,” cried Gay triumphantly. “Our ancestors in their wisdom and experience knew about those gales, and so they built us good, stout, pitched roofs. Ah, I often sit by my fire and listen, and I think, ‘That’s a gale and a half. I’d rather be where I am than out at sea.’”
Old Gay kept it up throughout the feast. Sitting by him, I found it impossible to feel any true sense of the past at all. The candles blew about, in the middle of the table the showpieces of gold and silver gleamed; all, including Gay’s conversation, was as it would have been at a feast twenty years earlier. The food was perhaps a little, though only a little, less elaborate, the wines were just as good. No, I got pleasure out of being there, but no sense of the past. True, I now knew half the Fellows only slightly. True, some of those I had known, and the one I had known best, were dead. But, as I sat by Gay, none of that plucked a nerve, as a visitant from the true past did. I could even think of the Baron de Charlus’ roll-call of his friends, and say to myself, “Despard-Smith, dead, Eustace Pilbrow, dead, Chrystal, dead, Roy Calvert, dead.” Not even that last name touched me; it was all a rhetorical flourish, as though one were making a nostalgic speech after a good dinner. Now I came to think of it, wasn’t Charlus’ roll-call just a flourish too?
In the shadows on the linenfold, I noticed a picture which was new since my last visit. Above the candlelight it was too dark to make out much of the face, although it did not look any better done than most of the college portraits. On the frame I could, however, read the gold letters:
Doctor R T A Crawford, FRS, Nobel Laureate, Forty-First Master.
Master 1937 –
My eyes went from the picture to the original, solid, Buddha-faced, in the middle of the table. His reign, so they all said, had been pretty equable. There did not seem to have been much to scar it. Now it was nearly over. They had prolonged him for three years above the statutory age of seventy, but he was to go in a year’s time: he would preside at the next Michaelmas audit feast, and that would be his last.
“Ah, Master,” Gay was calling out. “I congratulate you on this splendid evening. I congratulate you. Indeed I do.”
From his previous conversation, I thought he was not clear which, of all the Masters he had known, this was. Masters came and Masters went, and Gay, who was telling us that port did not agree with him, applied himself to the nuts.
In the jostle of the combination room afterwards, I felt my arm being squeezed. “Nice to see you,” came a round, breathy, enthusiastic whisper. “Slip out as soon as you decently can. We still finish up in my rooms, you know.”
It was Arthur Brown, the Senior Tutor. Some time passed before I could get free and when I entered Brown’s sitting-room it was already full. Brown gripped my hand.
“This is more like it,” he said. “I’ve been telling them, people got into the habit of dropping in here after feasts more years ago than I care to remember. I take it amiss that you haven’t been here since this time last year. You mustn’t forget us altogether, you know. Now I hope I can tempt you to a drop of brandy? I always think it’s rather soothing after a long dinner.”
He was a man of sixty-three, padded with flesh, broad-jowled, high-coloured. The residual wings of hair were white over his ears. He looked kind, he looked like someone who enjoyed seeing others happy: and that was true. He looked a bit of a buffer – to those who did not notice the eyes behind his spectacles, sparkling with inquisitiveness, or how, under the paunchy flesh, he carried his stomach high. In fact, when I had been a colleague of his in the college, I thought that he was one of the shrewdest managers of people that I had met. I still thought so, after meeting a good many more. He contrived to be at the same time upright, obstinate and very cunning.
The room was cosier, the temperature higher, than in most college sets. On the walls hung a collection of English watercolours, of which Brown had come to be a connoisseur. There were so many men in the room that they had split up into groups: that would not have happened in the first after-feast parties which I had attended there. The college was larger now, the average age of the Fellows lower, the behaviour just perceptibly less formal. Glass in hand, Francis Getliffe was talking to a knot of three young scientists; Martin and a handsome man whom I recognised as Skeffington were away in a corner with two arts Fellows, Clark and Lester Ince, both elected since I left.
By the fire, Brown and I were sitting drinking our brandy when Tom Orbell came and joined us. His face was pink, flushed and cheerful, but in Brown’s presence he was comporting himself with decorum, with a mixture of expansiveness and caution. What could be done about the chaplain? he was asking. Apparently there was a danger that he would be enticed away. He was intelligent, so Tom was saying, and it wasn’t all that easy nowadays to find an intelligent man in orders.
“Of course,” he turned to me with a flush of defiance, “that wouldn’t matter to you, Lewis. You wouldn’t mind if every clergyman in the country was mentally deficient. I expect you’d think it would make things easier if they were. But Arthur and I can’t take that view, can we?”
“I should have thought it was slightly extreme,” said Brown.
But he was not prepared to let Tom flaunt his piety at my expense. Brown was a “pillar of society”, conservative and Anglican, but he went to church out of propriety more than belief, and he was not entirely easy when young men like Orbell began displaying their religion. So Brown told a story in my favour, designed to show how careful I was about others’ faith.
“I’m sorry, Lewis,” said Tom, at his jolliest and most repentant, instantaneously quick to catch the feeling of someone like Brown, “it was absolutely monstrous of me to accuse you of that. You’re frightfully good, I know you are. And by the way, it was absolutely monstrous of me to inflict that evening on you with Laura Howard.”
“What’s that?” said Brown, his eyes alert and peering. “How did you come to be meeting Mrs Howard, Lewis?”
“I saddled him with it, I’m afraid,” Tom replied. “You see, she was wanting me to raise Cain in the college about her husband – which, as I believe all those protests of hers are just sheer nonsense, I couldn’t very well do, could I? Just sheer nonsense which she’s managed to make herself believe because she loves him, God knows why. So I didn’t want to make it easy for her to get to work on me, did I? Mind you, Arthur,” he said, “if I thought there was the slightest bit of sense in her case or even the chance that there could be a bit of sense in it, I’d have come and told you straight out that I was going to bring it up. I do mean that. I think it’s very important that people of my age should be ready to throw their weight about. I know you agree, Arthur, don’t you?”
Soon afterwards, Tom attached himself to Martin’s group. I was thinking that, as he explained himself to Brown, he had shown a delicate blend of the deferential and the man-to-man; beautiful to listen to. In private, out of hearing of persons in authority, few people rebelled as eloquently as Tom Orbell. In the hearing of persons in authority, the eloquence remained, but the rebellion not. In the company of Arthur Brown, Tom seemed above all desirous of growing into someone just like Arthur Brown – solid, rooted, statesmanlike, a man on top.
“So our young friend has been involving you with the Howards, has he?” asked Arthur Brown.
“You’ve been having more trouble than I thought, haven’t you?” I said.
“I need hardly say,” said Brown, “that none of this ought to be so much as mentioned outside the college. I needn’t tell you that, I know. Put it another way: I should have thought it was safer, if you only talked about it, even in this place, with Martin or the people you know well.”
“What’s this man Howard like, Arthur?” I asked.
The colour, heavy puce, deepened in Brown’s cheeks. He was frowning as though angry with me even for asking the question.
“He’s an unmitigated swine,” he said.
For an instant I was both astonished and thrown off my stride. I did not know many people more tolerant of others than Brown was. Also, he had spent so many years guarding his speech that it often seemed he couldn’t speak any other way.
Even Brown himself seemed startled at hearing his own outburst. He said, once more judicious, weighing his words: “No, I don’t think I feel inclined to withdraw what I’ve just said. I never have been able to find anything to set down in his favour. He’s a twister, but there are plenty of twisters that have some redeeming qualities, and I can’t recall this chap showing a single one. He’s graceless, he’s never been able to get on with anyone, and I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s why he wants to pull the world down round our ears. But I might have been able even to put up with that, if he hadn’t behaved so vilely to the people he owed everything to. When he started biting the hand that fed him, I decided I wasn’t going to look for any more excuses or listen to anyone else making them. He’s no good, Lewis. I don’t mind telling you that I considered at the time, and I still do, that we ought to have gone the whole hog and struck his name off the books.”
Brown had been speaking in a reasonable, moderate tone, but heavily, almost as though he had been giving his judgment to the other seniors. He added: “There’s only one good thing to be said about this wretched business. The whole college was absolutely solid about it. I don’t need to tell you that that’s not exactly common form. But if the college hadn’t been solid for once, it would have made things difficult. The place wouldn’t have been any too comfortable to live in. And I don’t want to exaggerate, but we might have walked straight into trouble outside. This is just the kind of thing that could have got us into the papers, and if that had happened, it would have done us more harm than I like to think about.”
Francis Getliffe had already gone, and the party was breaking up. Just as Martin said goodnight to Brown, and waited to take me across the staircase to his rooms, I was remarking on the new picture of the Master in the hall. “There’s exactly room for one more beside it,” I said as I stood up to go, “and then you’ll have to think again.”
I noticed Brown glancing sharply at me. Still sitting in his armchair, he tugged at my sleeve.
“Stay here a few minutes,” he said. He smiled at Martin: “He can find his own way to your bedroom, can’t he? After all, he’s done it plenty of times, more than you have, I suppose. And I don’t get many chances to talk to him these days.”
Martin said that it was time he went home to his wife. Like me, he suspected that Arthur Brown was not just idly keeping me back for the sake of company. When we were left alone, Brown made sure that I was settled in the chair opposite to him. He became more than ever hospitable and deliberate. “More brandy?”
No, I wouldn’t drink any more that night.
“Old chap,” he said, “it’s very nice to see you sitting there again.”
He had always been fond of me. At times he had defended and looked after me. Now he had the warm, sharp-edged, minatory affection that one feels for a protégé who has done pretty well. Was everything going all right? How was my wife? My son?
“So everything’s reasonably smooth just now, is it? That’s perfectly splendid. Do you know, Lewis, there was a time when I was afraid things weren’t going to turn out smooth for you.”
He gave me a kind, satisfied smile. Then he said, quite casually: “By the way, when you were talking about the Master’s picture, it just crossed my mind that you might have heard something. I suppose you haven’t, by any chance, have you?”
“No,” I said, surprised.
Brown said: “No, of course, I thought you couldn’t have.”
His expression was steady and unperturbed.
“Just for a moment, though on second thoughts I can see you couldn’t have been, I fancied you might be casting a fly.”
I shook my head, but now I thought I was following him.
“Well, what’s happening?” I said.
“The trouble is,” said Brown with satisfied gravity, “I’m not quite sure how much I’m at liberty to tell you. The whole matter is very much at the stage where no one has wanted to come out in the open. In my judgment the longer they put it off the more chance we have of avoiding ructions and coming to a decent conclusion.”
“What’s the point?” I asked again.
Brown pursed his lips. “Well, within these four walls, I think I’m not breaking any obligations if I tell you this. When the present Master retires, which is at the end of next year, not the academic but the calendar year, some of the society have asked me whether I would consider offering myself as a candidate.”
Yes, I had got there five minutes before. But, until he began to talk, I had not been expecting it. I had taken it for granted that Francis Getliffe had the next Mastership in the bag. On and off over the last two years, I had heard it discussed. The only name that anyone mentioned seriously was that of Francis.
“Who are your backers, Arthur?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “without their permission I don’t think that I ought to specify them at this stage, but I believe they’d let me say that there are enough of them to make the suggestion not entirely frivolous. And I think I might indicate that there were one or two of them recently present in this room.”
He was smiling blandly. He did not seem anxious, elated or depressed.
“If I were to ask for your advice whether to let my candidature go forward or not, Lewis, I wonder what you’d say?”
I hesitated. They were both friends of mine, and I was glad that I should be out of it. But I was hesitating for a different reason. I was afraid, despite what Brown had just said, that he would get few votes – perhaps so few as to be humiliating. I did not like the thought of that. I could not see any college not preferring Francis Getliffe when it came to the point.
“I think I know what’s in your mind,” Brown was saying. “You’re thinking that our friend Francis is out of comparison a more distinguished man than I am, and of course you’re right. I’ve never made any secret of it, I should be satisfied to see Francis Getliffe as Master of this college. Between ourselves, there are only three distinguished men here, and he’s one of them, the other two being the present Master and I suppose we’ve still got to say old Gay. I’ve never had delusions about myself, I think you’ll grant me that, old chap. I’ve never been really first rate at anything. It used to depress me slightly when I was a young man.”
He meant, I knew, precisely what he said. He was genuinely humble: he did not credit himself with any gifts at all.
I said: “I was thinking something quite different.”
Brown went on: “No, it’s perfectly right that the college should consider whether they could put up with an undistinguished person like me, in comparison with a very distinguished one like Francis. But one or two members of the society have put an interesting point of view which has made me think twice before saying no once and for all. Their view is that we’ve just had a Master of great external distinction, even more so than Francis’. So one or two people have represented to me that the college can afford someone who wasn’t much known outside but who could keep things going reasonably well among ourselves. And they paid me the compliment of suggesting that I might have my uses in that respect.”
“They are dead right,” I said.
“No,” he said, “you’ve always thought too much of me. Anyway, some time within the next twelve months I shall have to decide whether to let my name go forward. Of course, it’s my last chance and it isn’t Francis’. Perhaps I should be justified in taking that into account. Well, I’ve got plenty of time to make up my mind. I don’t know which way I shall come down.”
He had, of course, already “come down”. He was thinking, I was sure – although he had no vanity, he was a master-politician – about how his supporters ought to be handling his campaign and about how much more capably he would do it in their place. He was thinking too, I guessed, that it had been useful to talk to me, apart from warmth, affection and reciprocal support. I believed that he was hoping I should mention this conversation to Martin.