NEXT morning I had breakfast late, as I used to when I lived in college. The kidneys and bacon, the hard toast, the coffee: the sunlight through the low windows: the smell of flowers and stone: it gave me a sense of déja vu and in the same instant sharpened the strangeness of the day. Under the speckled sunshine, I read my newspaper. I had asked Martin and the others to leave me alone this first morning before the Court. All I had to do was ring up the head porter and tell him to see that Howard was available in college from half past ten. Then I went back to my newspaper, until the college bell began to toll.
The single note clanged out. It was five to ten, and we were due in the combination room on the hour. I walked through the fresh, empty, sunny court, the bell jangling and jarring through my skull. Through the door which led to the combination room, Arthur Brown, gown flowing behind him, was just going in. Following after him, from the lobby inside the door I borrowed a gown myself.
The bell tolled away, but in the room the four Seniors and Dawson-Hill had all arrived and were standing between the table and the windows. At night, the table dominated the room: but not so in the morning sunlight. The high polish on the rosewood flashed the light back, while outside the lawn shone in the sun. Seven chairs were set at the table, four on the side near the windows, the others on the fireplace side. Before each chair, as at a college meeting, were grouped a blotter, a pile of quarto paper, a steel-nibbed pen, a set of pencils. In addition to the college statutes, in front of the Master’s place loomed a leather-bound Victorian ledger with gold lettering on the back, a collection of Palairet’s notebooks, a slimmer green book also with gold lettering, and at least three large folders stuffed out with papers.
Good mornings sounded all round as I joined them. If these had been my business acquaintances, it crossed my mind, they would have shaken hands: but in the college one shook hands at the most once a year, on one’s first appearance each Michaelmas term. Arthur Brown observed that it was a better day. Nightingale said that we deserved some good weather.
Suddenly, with an emptiness of silence, the bell stopped. Then, a few seconds later, the college clock began to chime ten, and in the distance, like echoes, chimed out other clocks of Cambridge.
“Well, gentlemen,” said Crawford, “I think we must begin.”
Upright, soft-footed, he moved to the chair. On his right sat Winslow, on his left Brown; Nightingale was on the far right, beyond Winslow. They took up the places on the window side. Crawford pointed to the chair opposite Brown, across the table – “Will you station yourself there, Eliot?” Dawson-Hill’s place was opposite Nightingale and Winslow. The seventh chair, which was between Dawson-Hill’s and mine, and which faced the Master’s, was to be kept – so Crawford announced – “for anyone you wish to bring before us”.
Crawford sat, solid, image-like, his eyes unblinking as though they had no lids. He said: “I will ask the Bursar, as the Secretary of the Court of Seniors, to read the last Order.”
The leather-bound ledger was passed via Winslow to Nightingale, who received it with a smile. It was a pleased smile, the smile of someone who thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing, who liked being part of the ritual. Nightingale was wearing a bow-tie, a starched white shirt, and a new dark suit under his gown: he might have been dressed for a college wedding. He read: “A meeting of the Court of Seniors was held on April 22nd 1954. Present the Master, Mr Winslow, Mr Brown, Dr Nightingale. The following Order was passed: ‘That, notwithstanding the decision reached in the Order of April 15th 1951, the Court of Seniors was prepared to hold a further enquiry into the deprivation of Dr D J Howard, in the presence of legal advisers.’ The Order was signed by all members of the Court.
“That is all, Master,” said Nightingale.
“Thank you, Bursar,” said Crawford. “I think it is self-explanatory. I also think that we are all seized of the circumstances. Speaking as Master, I have nothing to add at this stage. Our legal advisers are now sitting with us. I have explained to them, and I believe the point is taken, that it is for Eliot to show us grounds why we should consider overruling a decision already given to the College. Eliot, we are ready to hear from you now.”
I had expected more of a preamble, and I was starting cold. I hadn’t got the feel of them at all. I glanced at Brown. He gave me a smile of recognition, but his eyes were wary and piercing behind his spectacles. There was no give there. He was sitting back, his jowls swelling over his collar, as in a portrait of an eighteenth-century bishop on the linenfold, the bones of his chin hard among the flesh.
I began, carefully conciliatory. I said that, in this case, no one could hope to prove anything; the more one looked into it, the more puzzling it seemed. The only thing that was indisputable was that there had been a piece of scientific fraud; deliberate fraud, so far as one could give names to these things. No one would want to argue about that – I mentioned that it had been agreed on, the night before, by Dawson-Hill and me, as common ground.
“I confirm that, Master,” came a nonchalant murmur from Dawson-Hill along the table.
Of course, I said, this kind of fraud was a most unlikely event. Faced with this unlikely event, responsible members of the college, not only the Court, had been mystified. I had myself, and to an extent still was. The only genuine division between the Court and some of the others was the way in which one chose to make the unlikely seem explicable. Howard’s own version, the first time I heard it, had sounded nonsense to me; but reluctantly, like others, I had found myself step by step forced to admit that it made some sort of sense, more sense than the alternative.
I was watching Brown, whose eyes had not left me. I hadn’t made them more hostile, I thought: it was time to plunge. So suddenly I announced the second piece of common ground. If the photograph now missing from Palairet’s Notebook V – I pointed to the pile in front of the Master – had been present there, and if that photograph had been a fraud, then that, for there would be no escape from it, would have to be a fraud by Palairet.
“No objection, Master,” said Dawson-Hill. “But I’m slightly surprised that Eliot has used this curious hypothesis in the present context.”
“But you agree to what I’ve said? I haven’t misrepresented you?” I asked him.
Dawson-Hill acquiesced, as I knew he would. Having given an undertaking, he would not be less than correct.
While he made his gibe about the “curious hypothesis”, I had glanced at Nightingale, who was writing notes for the minutes. Apart from the sarcastic twitch, his expression did not change; the waves of his hair, thick and lustrously fair for a man of sixty, seemed to generate light, down at the dark end of the table. Like a faithful functionary, he wrote away.
I went on: Who had done the fraud? Howard? or – we had all turned the suggestion down out of hand, but some of us couldn’t go on doing so – Palairet? As I’d started by saying, I couldn’t hope to prove, and possibly no one alive was in a position to, that Palairet had done it. The most I could hope to persuade them was that there existed a possibility they couldn’t dismiss, at any rate not safely enough to justify them breaking another man’s career. I should be able to prove nothing, I said. All I could reasonably set out to do before the Court was to ask a few questions and sharpen two or three doubts.
“Is that all for the present, Eliot?”
“I think it’s enough to be going on with, Master,” I said. I had spoken for a bare ten minutes.
Crawford asked Dawson-Hill if he wished to address the Court next. No, said Dawson-Hill: he would reserve his remarks, if any, until the Court had heard testimony from the Fellows that Eliot was bringing before them.
Crawford looked satisfied and bland. “Well,” he said, “at this rate it won’t take too long before we put our business behind us.” Then he added: “By the way, Eliot, there is one point I should like your opinion on. You repeated the suggestion which has of course been made to the Court before, and also to me in private – you repeated the suggestion, unless I misunderstood you, that it was Palairet who might have falsified his experiments. And you suggested it, again if I understood you correctly, not simply as a hypothesis or a ballon d’essai, but as something you thought probable. Or have I got you wrong?”
“No, Master,” I replied, “I’m afraid that’s so.”
“Then that’s what I should like your opinion on,” he said. “Speaking as a man of science, I find it difficult to give any credence to the idea. I oughtn’t to conceal that from you. Let me remind you, Palairet was moderately well-known to some of the senior members of the college. I should be over-stating things if I said that he was the most distinguished man of science that the college has produced in our time–” Just for an instant, I could not help reflecting that Crawford reserved that place for himself and to one’s irritation was dead right. “–but I have talked to men more familiar with his subject than I am, and I should not regard it as far wrong if we put him in the first six. He had been in the Royal Society for many years. He had been awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society. Several of his researches, so I am informed on good authority, are classical beyond dispute. That is, they have been proved by time. The suggestion is now that, at the age of seventy-two, he went in for cooking his results.”
(Suddenly Crawford’s Scottish accent, overlain by fifty years in Cambridge, broke through and we heard a long, emphatic “cooking”.)
“You think he could possibly, or even probably, have produced fraudulent data? Where I should like you to give us your opinion, is this – what reason could such a man have for going in for a kind of fraud that made nonsense of the rest of his life?”
I hesitated. “I didn’t know him,” I said.
“I did know him,” Winslow put in.
He looked at me from under his lids. He had been staring at the table, his neck corded like an old bird’s. But his hands, folded on his blotting-paper, stood out heavy-knuckled, the skin reddish, and neither freckled nor veined by age. “I did know him. He came up the year after the college had the ill-judgment to elect me to a Fellowship on the results of my Tripos.”
“What was he like?” I said.
“Oh, I should have said that he was a very modest young man. I confess that I thought also that he had a good deal to be modest about.” Winslow was in early morning form.
“What was he like afterwards?” I went on.
“I didn’t find it necessary to see him often. With due respect to the Master, the men of science of my period were not specially apt for the purposes of conversation. I should have said that he remained a very modest man. Which appeared to inhibit his expressing an interesting view on almost anything. Yes, he was a modest and remarkably ordinary man. He was one of those men who achieve distinction, much to one’s surprise, and carry ordinariness to the point of genius.”
I gazed at him. He had been a very clever person: in flashes he still was. Despite his disgruntlement and the revenges he took for his failure, he was at the core more decent than most of us. Yet he had never had any judgment of people at all. It was astonishing that anyone who had met so many, who had such mental bite, who had lived with such appetite, who had strong responses to almost anyone he met, should be so often wrong.
Nightingale raised his head from his notes.
“Eliot hasn’t answered the Master’s question, I think.”
“No–” I was beginning, but Nightingale went on: “You’ve suggested, though of course we know the suggestion isn’t your own invention, and we’re none of us holding you to blame–”
He smiled quite openly, smoothing the lines from his face – “But you’ve suggested that a distinguished old man has gone in for a bit of scientific forgery, so to speak. And mind you, and I want to stress this once again to everyone here, a very petty bit of scientific forgery at that. I mean, this work of Howard’s, or the work that’s referred to in Notebook V, is trivial compared with the old man’s real contribution. Nothing of this kind could possibly have added one per cent to his reputation. You’re asking us to believe that a man absolutely established, right at the top of his particular tree, is going to commit forgery for the sake of that? Putting it in its lowest terms, I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t wash. I think it’s up to you to answer the Master’s question.”
Brown turned his head towards Nightingale. Crawford nodded.
Until then, I had not known how the Court worked among themselves. I had had no sense of the balance of power. It was clear, the instant one noticed the others listening to Nightingale, that we outside had underestimated him. He carried more weight than I liked. Not that he had been offensive to me; he was brisk, efficient, impersonal, speaking to me as though we were acquaintances doing a piece of business. That impersonal tone was a strength. And it was another strength, of course, that he was immersed in the detail. More than anyone there, he knew what he was talking about.
“I can’t say anything very useful, as I didn’t know Palairet,” I replied to Crawford. “But do you want me to say why I don’t think it’s impossible?”
“We should be interested,” said Crawford.
I caught sight of Dawson-Hill along the table. His eyelids were pulled down in a half-smile of ridicule, or perhaps of professional sympathy. It seemed incredible to him, not used to academic meetings, that they should have rushed off in chase of this red herring. No rules, no relevance, in Dawson-Hill’s terms, but instead they had obstinately got their heads down to the psychology of scientific fraud.
I did my best. I reproduced the names and anecdotes Francis Getliffe had told me, when we first talked about the affair, before the Audit Feast. Those frauds had happened. We knew nothing, or almost nothing, about the motives. In no case did money come in – in one, conceivably, the crude desire to get a job. The rest were quite mysterious. If one had known any of the men intimately, would one have understood?
Anyone’s guess was as good as mine. But it didn’t seem impossible to imagine what might have led some of them on, especially the more distinguished, those in positions comparable with Palairet’s. Wasn’t one of the motives a curious kind of vanity? “I have been right so often. I know I’m right this time. This is the way the world was designed. If the evidence isn’t forthcoming, then just for the present I’ll produce the evidence. It will show everyone that I am right. Then no doubt in the future, others will do experiments and prove how right I was.” The little I had picked up about Palairet – it didn’t seem right out of his nature. I knew, I said to Winslow, that he gave one the impression of being a modest man. I should be prepared to believe that was true. But there was a kind of modesty and a kind of vanity which were hard to tell apart – and mightn’t they, in fact, be one and the same thing? Reading the rubrics in his notebook, couldn’t one at least think it possible that the aura of his personality had that particular tinge? Couldn’t one at least imagine him getting old and impatient, knowing he hadn’t much time, working on his last problem, not an important one, if you like, but one he was certain he knew the answer to? Certain that he knew how the world was designed? Almost as though it was the world designed by him. And mixed with that, perhaps, a spirit of mischief, such as one sometimes finds in the vain-and-modest – “this is what I can get away with”.
Catching Brown’s gaze, I knew that I had made a mistake. It was not just that his mind was made up against Howard. It was also that he didn’t like or trust what I was saying. He was a man of genuine insight, the only one on the Court. He knew the people around him with accuracy, compassion and great realism. But, although he had that insight, he had no use for psychological imaginings. As a rule, even when we were on opposite sides, he thought me sensible about people. This time, he was dismissing me as too clever by half.
It had been an awkward situation, and I had mishandled it. Under the pressure from Crawford and Nightingale, I had had no option except to take a risk, but I had shown bad judgment. Looking round the Court, I had to recognise that I had done more harm than good.