THROUGH the wet and windy Boxing Day, Martin played in the big drawing-room with the children – played just as I remembered him in our own childhood, concentrated and anxious to win. Irene and Margaret were laughing at us when he and I had a game together. He had invented a kind of ping-pong, played sitting down with rulers at a low table, and complicated by a set of bisques.
Though our wives knew what was on Martin’s mind, for we had told them last thing the night before, no one would have guessed it. He was out to win, within the rules, but just within the rules. His son, Lewis, watched with the same bright eyes, the same concentration, as his father’s: so did my son. When we had finished, Martin coached them both, patiently showing them how to cut the ball, repeating the stroke while the minutes passed, as though going through his head there was no thought of Skeffington’s conversion, no thought of anything except the cut-stroke at ping-pong. Outside, through the long windows, one could see the trees lashing and the grass dazzling in the rain.
Just before tea, the children went of to put records on their gramophone. Martin said to me: “I don’t know. I don’t know. Do you?”
For years we had talked like acquaintances. But we could still get on without explanation: we caught the tone of each other’s voice.
I replied: “I wish I understood the scientific evidence better. I suppose understanding that does make it a bit easier, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose it might,” said Martin, with a tucked-in smile. He did not say any more that day. At the same time the following afternoon, when again we were having a respite from the children, we were sitting with Irene and Margaret. The rain was slashing the windows and the room had turned dark except for a diffused gleam, reflected from the garden, of green and subaqueous light.
“This is a wretched business,” said Martin at large, not with worry so much as annoyance. Again I knew he had not been thinking of much else.
“Tomorrow morning I shall have to have this talk with Skeffington,” he said to me.
“Can’t you put him off?” said Irene.
“What are you going to tell him?” I said.
He shook his head.
Margaret said: “I can’t help hoping you’ll be able to agree with him.”
“Why do you hope that?” Irene broke out.
“If Skeffington’s right, it must have been pretty shattering for Howard, mustn’t it? And I should have thought it was even worse for her,” said Margaret.
“What are you going to say tomorrow?” I came back at Martin.
Margaret asked: “Is Skeffington right?”
Martin looked straight at her. He had a respect for her. He knew that, of all of us, she would be the hardest to refuse an answer to.
He said: “It makes some sort of sense.”
She said: “Do you really think he could be right?” Her tone was even, almost casual: she did not seem to be pressing him. Yet she was.
“It seems to make more sense,” said Martin, “than any other explanation. But still, it’s very hard to take.”
“Do you believe he’s right?”
Martin replied: “Possibly.”
Unexpectedly, Margaret burst into laughter, laughter spontaneous and happy. “Have you thought,” she cried, “what awful fools we should all look?”
Martin said: “Yes, I’ve thought of that.”
“All of us thinking how much we know about people!”
For once Irene did not see any sort of joke. Frowning, she said to Martin: “Look here, have you got to get yourself involved too much with all this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose Skeffington goes ahead. There’s going to be a row, isn’t there?”
Martin glanced at me. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“Well, have you got to get into it? I mean, have you got to start it? It isn’t your business, is it?”
“Not specially, no.”
“Whose is it?” Margaret asked.
He told her that constitutionally it would be for the sub-committee – Nightingale and Skeffington – to take the first steps.
“Well then,” said Irene, “do you need to do much yourself?”
“No, I don’t need to,” said Martin. He added: “In fact, if I don’t want to quarrel with half the society, I can keep out of it more or less.”
“Can you?” said Margaret. She had flushed. She said passionately to Irene, “Do you really want him to sit by?”
Almost as though by reflection, Irene had flushed also. Surprisingly, she and Margaret got on well. Neither then nor at any time could Irene bear to have her sister-in-law disapprove of her, much less to think her crude and selfish. For Irene, despite, or to some extent because of, her worldliness, had both a humble and generous heart.
“Oh,” she said, “someone will put it right if there’s anything to put right. If old Martin were the only chap who could, I suppose he’d have to. But let Julian S do the dirty work, that’s what he’s made for. Those two won’t mind getting in bad with everyone here. All I meant was, we’re settling down nicely now, we haven’t got any enemies for the first time in our lives.”
“Isn’t there a danger – you’re frightened that if Martin makes a fuss over this – it might stand in his way?”
Irene replied, shamefaced with defiance: “If you want the honest truth, yes, I’m frightened of that too.”
Margaret shook her head. Even now, after marrying me, and meeting my colleagues, and getting a spectator’s view of the snakes and ladders of power, she could not quite credit it. Her grandfather and great-uncle had resigned Fellowships over the Thirty-Nine Articles. I sometimes teased her, did she realise how much difference it had meant to them and even to her, that they had both been men of independent means? Yet she stayed as pure as they had been. She did not think that Martin or I were bad men: because she loved me, she thought that in some ways I was a good one: but she could not sympathise with the shifts, the calculations, the self-seekingness of men making their way.
“Do you think,” she said, apparently at random, “that Laura ever had any doubts about him?”
“No,” I said.
“She’s totally wrapped up in him,” said Martin. “I don’t imagine she ever had a second’s doubt.”
“In that case, she must be the only person in the world who didn’t. I wonder what it’s been like for her?”
Margaret, I knew, was deliberately playing on our human interest. She, too, was subtle. She knew precisely what she wanted Martin – and, if I could take part, me also – to do.
But Irene sidetracked her by saying casually: “Well, she’d never tell me. She just can’t bear the sight of me.”
“Why ever not?” I asked.
“I just can’t think.”
“I expect she fancies,” said Martin, “that you’ve cast an eye at Donald.”
“Oh, she can’t think that! She can’t!” cried Irene, as usual hilarious (though she detested Howard and had been for years a faithful wife) at the bare prospect of adultery.
Then she said to Margaret: “It isn’t going to be fun, doing anything for them, don’t you see that?”
“I tell you, that’s putting it mildly,” said Martin.
“You won’t stick your neck out if you don’t need to? That’s all I’m asking you. Will you?”
“Do you think I ever have done?” said Martin.
None of us was certain how he proposed to act, or whether he proposed to act at all. Even when he sounded for opinion that night at the Master’s dinner table, he did it in the same ambiguous tone.
Until Martin began that sounding, the dinner had been a standard and stately specimen of the Crawford régime. It would not have happened if I had not been in Cambridge, for the Crawfords had only returned to the Lodge late on Boxing Day. But Crawford, who had never been a special friend of mine, had a kind of impersonal code that ex-Fellows who had achieved some sort of external recognition should not stay in Cambridge uninvited: so that night, in the great drawing-room at the Lodge, ten of us were drinking our sherry before dinner, the Nightingales, the Clarks, Martin and Irene, me and Margaret, and the Crawfords themselves, the men in white ties and tails, for Crawford, an old-fashioned Cambridge radical, had refused in matters of etiquette to budge an inch.
He stood, hands in pockets, coat-tails over arms, warming his back at his own fireplace, invincibly contented, so it seemed. He was a heavy, shortish, thickly made man who still, at the age of seventy-two, had a soft-footed, muscular walk. He looked nothing like seventy-two. His Buddha-like face, small-featured and round, had something of the unlined youthfulness, or rather agelessness, that one sees often in Asians, but very rarely in Europeans: his hair, glossy black, was smoothed down and did not show any grey at all.
He talked to each of us with impersonal cordiality. He said to me that he had “heard talk” of me in the “club” (the Athenaeum) just before Christmas, to Nightingale that the college had done well to get into that last list of American equities, to Martin that a new American research student seemed to be highly thought-of. When we had gone in to dinner and settled down to the meal, with the same cordiality he addressed us all. The subject that occurred to him, as we ate an excellent dinner, was privilege. He went on: “Speaking as the oldest round this table by a good few years, I have seen the disappearance of a remarkable amount of privilege.”
Crawford continued to deliver himself. The one thing on which all serious people were agreed, all over the world, was that privilege must be done away with; the amount of it had been whittled away steadily ever since he was a young man. All the attempts to stop this process had failed, just as reaction in its full sense had always failed. All over the world people were no longer prepared to see others enjoying privilege because they had a different coloured skin, or spoke in a different tone, or were born into families that had done pretty well for themselves. “The disappearance of privilege – if you want something that gives you the direction of time’s arrow,” said Crawford, “that’s as good as anything I know.”
Hanna could not restrain herself. With a sharp smile, she said: “It’s still got some way to go, shouldn’t you say?”
She looked round the table at the white ties, the evening dresses, the panelled walls beyond, the amplitude of the Lodge dining-room, the lighted pictures on the walls.
“Fair comment, Mrs Clark,” said Crawford, imperturbable, gallant. “But we mustn’t be misled by appearances. Speaking as the present incumbent, I assure you that I can’t imagine how my successors in the next generation are going to manage to run this Lodge. Unless indeed a society which is doing away with privilege decides to reward a few citizens for achievement by housing them in picturesque surroundings that no one else is able to afford. It would be interesting if a certain number of men of science in the next generation were still enabled to live in Lodges like this or the Carlsberg mansion at Copenhagen.”
As the talk became chit-chat, I was paying attention to Mrs Nightingale, whom I had not met before. She was a plump woman in the late thirties, a good twenty years younger than he was. Her shoulders and upper arms were beginning to ham out with fat; her eyes were full, sleepy, exophthalmic. But that sleepy plumpness was deceptive. Underneath she seemed energetic and quick-moving. When I said to her, pompously, as we were considering whether to pour sauce on to the pudding: “Now if we’re wise–”, she replied, dead-panned but instantaneous: “Don’t let’s be wise.” Between her and Nightingale there passed glances sparkling with both humour and trust. She referred to him as the Lord Mayor, a simple private joke which continued to delight him. They were happy, just as Martin and the others had told me. I was astonished that he had found such a nice woman.
I had been half-expecting Martin to lead in Howard’s name. All through dinner he did not mention him; he was still playing his part in the chit-chat when the women left us. But in fact it would have been surprising if he had not waited until the men were alone. College manners were changing in some of the young men, but not in Martin. He would no more have thought of discussing college business in the Lodge in front of wives than Crawford would, or Brown, or old Winslow. Though Martin was used to the company of women like Margaret or Hanna, though he knew how they detested the Islamic separation, Martin would not have considered raising his question that night until they had gone.
When the door had closed behind them, Crawford called for us to sit nearer to him. “Come up, here, Nightingale! Come beside me, Eliot! Will you look after yourself, Martin?” It occurred to me, still thinking of Martin’s manners, that while he kept some of old-style Cambridge, Crawford had, in just one respect, dropped his. Crawford called his contemporaries by their surnames, and that had been common form until the ’20s. Even in my time, there were not many Fellows who were generally called by their Christian names. But, since the young used nothing else, since Martin and Walter Luke and Julian Skeffington had never been known by anything but their Christian names to their own contemporaries, the old men also began to call them so. With the result that Crawford and Winslow, who after fifty years of friendship still used each other’s surnames, seemed oddly familiar when they spoke to the younger Fellows. As it happened, I came just at the turning-point, and to both Crawford and Winslow, though my brother was “Martin”, I remained “Eliot”.
The five of us had been alone for some time, the decanter had gone round, before Martin spoke. He asked, in a casual, indifferent, almost bored manner: “Master, I suppose you haven’t thought any more about the Howard business?”
“Why should I? I don’t see any reason why I should, do you?” said Crawford.
Martin replied: “Why should you indeed?”
He said it dismissively, as though his original question had been silly. He was sitting back in his chair, solid and relaxed, with Clark between himself and Crawford. Though he looked relaxed, his eyes were on guard, watching not only Crawford, but Nightingale and Clark. He said: “As a matter of fact, I thought I heard that it was just possible some fresh evidence might still turn up.”
“I don’t remember hearing the suggestion,” said Crawford. He spoke without worry. “I must say, Martin, it sounds remarkably hypothetical.”
“I suppose,” said Martin, “that if more evidence really did turn up, we might conceivably have to consider reopening the case, mightn’t we?”
“Ah well,” said Crawford, “we don’t have to cross that bridge till we come to it. Speaking as a member of our small society, I’ve never been fond of hypothetical situations involving ourselves.”
It was a reproof, good-humoured, but still a reproof. Martin paused. Before he had replied, Nightingale gave him a friendly smile and said: “There’s a bit more to it than that, Master.”
“I’m getting slightly muddled,” said Crawford, not sounding so in the least. “If there is any more to it, why haven’t I been informed?”
“Because, though there is a bit more to it on paper,” Nightingale went on, “it doesn’t amount to anything. It certainly doesn’t amount to enough to disturb you with at Christmas. I mean, Martin is perfectly right to say that a certain amount of fresh evidence has come in. It’s not fair to accuse him of inventing hypothetical situations.”
Crawford laughed. “Never mind about that. If he’s not used to being misjudged at his age, he never will be.”
“No,” Nightingale persisted. “I for one am grateful that he mentioned the matter.”
“Yes, Bursar?” said Crawford.
“It gives us the chance to settle it without any more commotion.”
Martin leaned forward and spoke to Nightingale: “When did you hear about this?”
“Last night.”
“Who from?”
“Skeffington.”
Just for an instant, Martin’s eyes flashed.
“It’s all perfectly in order, Master,” Nightingale said to Crawford. “You’ll remember, Skeffington and I were the committee deputed to make a technical report to the Seniors in the first instance. Naturally we’ve assumed it was our duty to keep our eyes open for any development since. It happens that the last instalments of Professor Palairet’s scientific papers have arrived at the Bursary since the Seniors made their decision. Both Skeffington and I have gone through them. I think it’s only fair for me to say that he’s made a more thorough job of it than I’ve been able to do. The only excuse I’ve got is that the Bursary manages to keep me pretty busy.”
“We all know that,” said Crawford.
“So these very last notebooks I hadn’t been able to do more than skim through. It was those that Skeffington brought to my attention last night.”
“When did you hear?” Suddenly Clark spoke in a quiet voice to Martin, but Nightingale had gone on: “I’m glad to say that I saw nothing which makes the faintest difference to my original opinion. If I were writing my report to the Seniors again today, I should do it in the same terms.”
“That’s exactly what I should have expected.” Crawford said it with dignity and authority.
“I don’t think I ought to conceal from you, in fact I’m sure I oughtn’t,” said Nightingale, “that in the heat of the moment Skeffington didn’t take entirely the same view. He gave to one piece of evidence an importance that I couldn’t begin to, and I think, if I have to take the words out of his mouth, that he would have felt obliged to include it, if he were re-writing his own report. Well, that’s as may be. But even if that happened, I am quite sure that in the final result it wouldn’t have had the remotest effect on the Seniors’ findings.”
“Which means,” said Crawford, “that we should have been bound to take the same action.”
“Inevitably it does,” said Nightingale.
“Of course,” said Clark.
Crawford had settled himself, his hands folded on his paunch, his eyes focused on the wainscot.
“Well, this is a complication we could reasonably have been spared,” he said. “I am inclined to think the Bursar is right, Martin has done us a service by bringing up the subject. Speaking as Master for a moment, there is one thing I should like to impress upon you all. I should also like to impress it on Skeffington and our other colleagues. In my judgment, this college was remarkably lucky to avoid a serious scandal over this business. I never took the violent personal objection to Howard that some of you did, but a piece of scientific fraud is of course unforgivable. And any unnecessary publicity about it, even now, is as near unforgivable as makes no matter. We’ve come out of it internally with no friction that I know of. And externally, better than any of us could have hoped. I do impress on you, this is a time to count our blessings and not disturb the situation. In my view, anyone who resurrects the trouble is taking a grave responsibility upon himself. We did justice so far as we could, and as the Bursar says, we have every reason within the human limits to believe that our findings were the right ones. Anyone who tries to open it all over again is going to achieve nothing except a certain amount of harm for the college, and a risk of a good deal more.”
“I’d just like to ask again, as I’ve asked you all in private often enough,” said Nightingale, “if this man felt he had been hard done by, why in Heaven’s name didn’t he bring an action for wrongful dismissal?”
“I agree with every word you’ve both said,” Clark broke in. He was hunched round to ease the weight on his leg. His smile was sweet, a little helpless, a little petulant. All of a sudden I realised that, just as Martin had said, he was a man of formidable moral force. “Except, if I may say so, personally I think worse of the man responsible for it all. I always thought it was a mistake to elect him, and I was sorry that our scientific friends got their way. I know we all kept off the question of his politics. Politics is becoming a taboo word. I’m going to be quite frank. I should have to be convinced that, in present conditions, a man of Howard’s politics can be a man of good character, as I understand the term. And I am not prepared to welcome such men in the name of tolerance, the tolerance that they themselves despise.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to say that earlier,” Nightingale broke out.
Martin had not spoken for a long time. In the same tone, neither edgy nor over-concerned, in which he had made his first approach, he said: “But that isn’t really the point, is it? The real point is what the Bursar said about the evidence.”
Clark replied: “What the Bursar said settled that, didn’t it?”
The curious thing was, I thought, that Nightingale, Clark, and Martin liked one another. When we went into the drawing-room there was no sign of argument on any of them. In fact, there had not been a word of disagreement spoken.
As the college clock struck the half-hour, it must have been half past eleven, Martin and Irene, Margaret and I, were walking up Petty Cury on the way home. In the empty street, Martin said softly: “I got even less change than I reckoned on.”
He had spoken in a matter-of-fact tone, but when Margaret said: “The Nightingales know all about it, don’t they?” he turned on her: “How did you hear that?”
“I wanted to see what she and Hanna were thinking–”
“You talked about the Howard business, did you?”
“Of course–”
“You told them that Skeffington was worried?”
“Naturally.”
“Can none of you be trusted?” Martin broke out.
“No, I won’t take that–”
“Can none of you be trusted?” He had quite lost his temper, something so rare for him that Irene and I glanced at each other with discomfort, a discomfort different from just looking on at her husband and my wife snacking. As his voice sharpened, his face lost its colour: while Margaret, whose hot temper had risen to meet his cold one, was flushing, her eyes snapping, looking handsome and less delicate.
“Has everyone got to talk the minute you get hold of a piece of gossip? Has that fool Skeffington got to blurt out the whole story before any of us have had a chance to have a look at it? Has none of you any idea when it’s useful to keep your mouths shut?”
“Don’t you realise Connie Nightingale is a good sort? She and Hanna will have some influence–”
“They’ll have that, without your talking to them before the proper time.”
“Why should you think no one else can judge the proper time?”
“Just from watching the mess you’re all getting into.”
“I must say,” said Margaret violently, “you seem to assume this is a private game of yours. I’m damned if that is good enough for me. You’d better face it, this isn’t just your own private game.”
Speaking more quietly than she had done, but also more angrily, Martin said: “It might be more convenient if it were.”