FOR an instant, none of us moved. It would have been hard to tell whether Martin had heard what Skeffington had just said. He was not looking at Skeffington. He gazed steadily at the hearth, in which the electric fire had one small incandescent star, much brighter than the glowing bars, where a contact had worked loose.
“What made you go into the business again?” he said at last, as though merely curious, as though that were the only question on his mind.
“I tell you,” said Skeffington, temper near the surface, “that he’s been telling the truth.”
“Can you prove it?” said Martin sharply.
“I can prove it enough to satisfy myself. Damn it, do you think I want to blackguard the old man?”
“That’s fair comment,” said Martin. “But have you got a hundred per cent proof that’ll satisfy everybody else?”
“Have you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what you intend to do,” I said, “but can you do anything without what a lawyer would think of as a proof? Have you got one?”
He looked flushed and haughty.
“In that sense,” he said, “I’m not sure that I have. But it will be good enough for reasonable people.”
“Then what do you intend to do?” Martin took up my question.
“The first thing is to get this chap Howard a square deal. That goes without question.”
He said it simply, honourably, and with his habitual trace of admonition and priggishness.
“When did you decide that?”
“The moment I realised that there was only one answer to the whole business. That was yesterday afternoon, though for forty-eight hours I hadn’t been able to see any other option.”
“I’m sorry,” said Martin, turning to him, “but it’s not so easy to accept that there can’t be one.”
“Don’t you think I’ve made sure that I’ve closed all the holes?”
“Don’t you think you might be wrong? After all, you’re saying you’ve been wrong once before, aren’t you?”
“You’ll see that I’m not wrong,” said Skeffington. “And there’s one point where I’d like your advice, both of you.”
He began answering the question Martin had asked first – what had made him “go into the business again”? It happened that, though Skeffington’s wife had not often seen her uncle Palairet while he was alive, she was on good terms with his solicitors. A partner in the firm had mentioned to the Skeffingtons that the last box of the old man’s papers was being sent to the college. Skeffington had, of course, thought it his duty to go through them.
As he explained, I thought, as I had done before, that his voice did not live up to his looks. It was both monotonous and brittle. But his mind was more competent than I had given him credit for. It was precise, tough, not specially imaginative, but very lucid. People had given me the impression that he was an amateur, and lucky ever to have been elected. I began to doubt it.
I was interested in his attitude towards old Palairet. Obviously he had not known him well. Skeffington seemed to have had an impersonal respect for him as a scientist of reputation, such as Skeffington himself longed to be. For Skeffington felt a vocation for science. He might be rich, he might be smart: he was not at ease with the academics, he could not talk to them as he had been able to talk to his brother-officers: the reason why he could get on with Martin and me was that he had met us in the official world, and knew some of the people we knew. Yet for all that, though he could not in his heart accept most of “those chaps” as social equals, he longed to win their recognition. He longed to do good work, as Palairet and Getliffe had done; he might have said this was setting his sights too high, but he was seeking exactly that kind of esteem.
“How did your wife get on with her uncle?” I asked, just as he was leading off into the scientific exposition.
“Oh,” said Skeffington, “he never saw her jokes.”
For a second I caught a sparkle in Martin’s eye. As I had heard him give both Skeffingtons maximum marks for humourlessness, I wondered what astonishing picture that reply conveyed.
As Skeffington went on, I found both him and Martin agreeing that whatever the old man was like, most of his scientific work was sound and safely established on the permanent record. His major set of researches were “textbook stuff”, Skeffington insisted.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” said Skeffington, simple, high-minded, incredulous. “Because, assuming that he cooked this other business, it couldn’t have done him tuppence-ha’pennyworth of good. It just doesn’t count beside the real good, solid stuff he’d got behind him. Was he crackers, do you think?”
The old man had done first-class scientific research, they told me: his major work, on the diffraction of atomic particles, was “quite water-tight”: some of the photographs were reproduced in the standard books. Martin fetched down a couple of volumes, and showed me the photographs, rather like rifle targets with alternate rings of light and dark. Those results were beyond dispute: they had been repeated, time and time again, in laboratories all over the world.
It was also beyond dispute that Palairet had become interested in an extension of his technique – not an important extension, something which only counted “marginally”, by the side of his established work. He had expected to be able to apply his technique to a slightly different kind of particle-diffraction. “For a rather highbrow reason, that no one could possibly have thought up a year ago, we now know it couldn’t work,” said Skeffington. But the old man had expected it to work. So had Howard, doing his research under the old man’s eye. The photograph in Howard’s paper demonstrated that it did work, said Martin, with a grim chuckle: demonstrated it by the unorthodox device of taking a genuine diffraction photograph and “blowing it up”, just like enlarging an ordinary photograph, so as to increase the distances between the light rings and the dark. It was from these distances that Howard in his paper had calculated the wave-lengths of the particles. “After blowing it up, someone got the results he expected,” said Skeffington.
For the first time I heard how the fraud had been detected. When the negative had been “blown up”, the hole left by a drawing-pin which had held it up to dry had been expanded too. As soon as the result had been proved to be theoretically impossible, the Americans had enquired why the white blob at the top centre of the photograph seemed so singularly large. It was just as simple as that.
According to Howard, when at last he gave the Court of Seniors his explanation, that photograph had not been the first the old man had shown him. He had told me the same.
To credit his story, one had to assume that he was absolutely trusting. If it were feasible at all, it meant that he had been indoctrinated beforehand. However uncritical he was, he must have been ready to believe in the evidence, he must have taken for granted that the technique was “on”, before he put that final photograph into his paper.
“Even so,” said Martin, “he would have to be pretty wooden.”
“That’s as may be,” said Skeffington, who had until a few days before thought the whole account so preposterous as to be an insult. It was only out of mechanical duty, automatic conscientiousness, that when he heard that more of the old man’s manuscripts had reached the college, he went into the Bursary, borrowed the key of the Palairet box, and took them away.
“Had the Bursar told you they’d arrived?” asked Martin.
“The usual piece of formal bumf,” said Skeffington. As soon as any scientific document arrived from Palairet’s executors, Nightingale sent a reference number to Skeffington, so I gathered.
Without interest Skeffington had sat in his rooms, reading through the last notebooks.
“Have we got them all now?” asked Martin.
“So far as they know, we’ve got them all.”
Without interest, Skeffington had read on. “Old man’s stuff, most of it,” he said. Jottings about researches which Palairet would never do: occasional sets of data, corrections of earlier papers. But at last, on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas, something had turned up. “I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t take in what it meant. I was sitting in my rooms in the Fellows’ building, and I went out and walked in the garden, and I couldn’t see anything that made sense. I don’t mind telling you, I wasn’t very bright about it.”
He looked at Martin. “As a matter of fact, I’ve brought it along with me.”
“May I see it?” Even Martin’s politeness was wearing sharp.
Skeffington opened a briefcase which he had brought with him into the room, and produced a thick exercise book, such as I remembered using in the Oxford Senior class at school. Sticking out of it was a bookmarker. “Yes,” said Skeffington, “I’ve kept the place.” It sounded so matter-of-fact as to be absurd. Just as it did when he assured us that he had signed a receipt for the exercise book with the Bursar’s clerk.
“All right, Julian,” said Martin. Then Skeffington put his fingers, delicate, square-tipped, on the marker and said: “Here we are.”
I had gone across to glance at the book over Martin’s shoulder. My first impression was of an almost empty page. Then I read at the top, in a spiky, old-fashioned holograph, the date, July 20th, 1950. Underneath the date were several lines of handwriting, which began: Tried diffraction experiments using neutron source A and crystal grating B, encouraging results. Then a blank space in the middle of the page, with a rim of sticky paper, as though something had been removed. Underneath, at the bottom of the page, the handwriting went on: Above print gives strong support for view that diffraction of neutrons at higher speeds, corresponding to wavelengths shown above, follows precisely the same pattern as at low speeds (see CJBP, Proc. Roy. Soc. A…1942, 1947). Have always predicted this. Follow up.
“The photograph’s missing, is it?” said Martin.
“The point is,” Skeffington said loudly to me, “that what he says at the bottom can’t be true. This is where the Howard paper starts off.” He tapped the page. “It can’t be true.”
“If there ever was a print there,” Martin was reflecting, “either it couldn’t have shown anything at all–”
“Or else that had been blown up too.”
“Where is it?” said Martin.
Skeffington shrugged his shoulders.
“Something was there once, wasn’t it?”
“The point is,” he went on loudly again, “if Howard saw that print and that entry, then his story stands up as near as makes no matter. However you read that entry, the old man was fooling himself, if he wasn’t fooling anybody else. I don’t know what he was up to – he must have been crackers. But I do know that it gees with the Howard story, and I don’t believe that there’s any way out of it. Can you see one?”
“If the print were there,” said Martin in a soft, deliberate tone, “then I don’t think I could.”
“But still.”
Martin sat frowning. He asked me for a cigarette. After a time he said: “I can’t believe there isn’t a way out of it.”
“Do you think I want to believe it?” Skeffington’s tone, just as when he started to explain, was haughty and annoyed. “It isn’t exactly pleasant for me to stir up mud about the old man – and, if I had to stir up mud about someone connected with my family, I shouldn’t choose to do it on behalf of anyone like Howard. We never ought to have let in a chap like that. But the point is, we did let him in, and I believe he’s an innocent man–”
“Oh, yes, Julian,” Martin roused himself, and for once was speaking restlessly, sarcastically, and without civility. “We know that you believe that. It’s like G H Hardy’s old crack: If the Archbishop of Canterbury says he believes in God, that’s all in the way of business, but if he says he doesn’t, one can take it he means what he says. We don’t need persuading that you mean what you say. We know you believe it. But I don’t see that recognising your conviction gets us very far.”
At Martin’s tone, so untypically sharp, Skeffington showed no resentment. He just threw his head back and said: “It might get us a bit further when I’ve settled what to do next.”
Martin was composed and cautious again. He said: “I hope you won’t do anything until we’ve all thought it over.”
“I can’t wait long.”
“I’m not asking you to wait long.”
“I should like to see Nightingale tomorrow.”
“I hope you won’t do anything,” said Martin, “until we’ve thought it over.”
“I can’t put it off. That isn’t good enough–”
“No one’s asking you to put it off. Look, it’s Boxing Day tomorrow. I’d be grateful for another twenty-four hours after that. Then I’ll be ready to talk.”
Reluctantly, Skeffington acquiesced. He went on: “But there’s something I want your advice on now. Lewis, you’ve heard the state of the game. I want to know, shall I write to this chap Howard tonight? I mean, I don’t feel specially inclined to talk to him. But he hasn’t had a square deal, and I think he’s entitled to know that someone like me is going to make it his business to see that he gets one.”
“It would be a good thing to write to him, I should have thought,” I said. “So long as you make it clear you’re only speaking for yourself.”
I was thinking, Skeffington was a brave and honourable man. He had not had an instant’s hesitation, once he believed that Howard was innocent. He was set on rushing in. Personal relations did not matter, his own convenience did not matter, nor how people thought of him. Both by nature and by training, he was single-minded: the man had his rights, one had to make sure that justice was done. Yet, inside that feeling, there was no kindness towards Howard. There was no trace of a brotherly emotion at all. The only residue of feeling he had for Howard was contempt. Contempt not because he and Skeffington had not an idea in common, but just because he was an object of justice. I had seen the same in other upright men: one was grateful for their passion to be just, but its warmth was all inside themselves. They were not feeling as equals: it was de haut en bas: and, not only towards those who had perpetrated the injustice, but also, and often more coldly, towards the victim, there was directed this component of contempt.
“The chief thing is, isn’t it,” I said, “that you mustn’t raise false hopes?”
“I think it would be much better,” said Martin, “if you didn’t write at all until we’ve talked it over. Won’t that give you a clearer idea of just what you can and cannot say?”