Irene laughed as though glad of the excuse, just to break the tension.
“Patience,” said Martin. “How do you fancy yourself in that respect?”
Skeffington gave a sheepish smile.
“Persuasive power,” said Martin. “There you might be better than you think. And, I’m afraid this is going to be necessary, considerable command of tactics. I mean, political tactics. I don’t think you’ll like it, I don’t think Margaret will, but it’s going to need a good deal of politics to put Howard in the clear.”
“Perhaps you know more about that than I do—”
“I do, Julian.”
Martin was still explaining carefully. “This business is going to split the college from top to bottom. Anyone who’s seen anything of this kind of society would know that. Lewis knows it as well as I do. It will make the place unlivable in and do some of us a certain amount of harm into the bargain. And this is the last thing I want to say to you. I wouldn’t feel quite easy until I’d said it in so many words, before you plunge in. If you do plunge in, you’ve got to be ready for certain consequences to yourself. You’re bound to make yourself conspicuous. You’re bound to say things which people don’t want to hear. The odds are that it will damage your chances. Look, let me be brutal. I know you want your Fellowship renewed when it runs out. I know you’d like to be a fixture. I’d like you to be, too. But if you make too much of a nuisance of yourself, there’s going to be a cloud round the name of Skeffington. I don’t mean that they’d do anything flagrantly unjust, or which they thought was unjust. If you were Rutherford or Blackett or Rabi or G I Taylor, they would keep you as a Fellow even if you insulted the Master every night of your life. But most of us aren’t all that good. With most of us there is a perfectly genuine area of doubt about whether we’re really any better than the next man. And then, if there’s a cloud round your name, they’re liable to think, and it’s very hard to blame them, that perhaps they might let your Fellowship run out, and give someone else a go. Just as they might think, perfectly reasonably, that half a dozen people would do the Senior Tutorship as well or better than I should. So, if they have anything against us, the net result is liable to be that Skeffington is out, and M F Eliot doesn’t get promotion.”
“What does all that add up to?” said Skeffington.
“I just wanted you to know. If I’m going to take a risk myself, I like to reckon out the chances beforehand.”
“Do you seriously think any of that is going to keep me quiet?” Skeffington had flushed again, and he looked at Martin as though he despised him.
“No, I didn’t think so.”
“So you are going in up to the neck, are you?” Irene asked Skeffington.
“What else do you expect me to do?”
Suddenly she turned to her husband, and said: “What about you?”
Martin answered straight away: “Oh, there’s nothing for it. I shall have to help him as much as I can.”
“I knew you would! I knew you would!” Irene cried out, half in reproach, half in pleasure, still youthful, that he should do something dashing.
Of us all, Skeffington was the only one totally surprised. He sat with his mouth slightly open; I wondered if Martin remembered that our mother used a word for just that expression — “flabbergasted”. Just for an instant, Skeffington did not seem pleased to have a comrade; he had an expression of resentment, as if Martin had made a fool of him. He liked Martin, and he expected people he liked to behave like himself, simply and honourably. He had been led astray by Martin’s deviousness, his habit, growing on him as he became older, of giving nothing away.
Myself, I believed that Martin had two motives. The nearer one was to him, the more often he seemed hard, selfish, cautious, calculating. With his wife, for instance, he was so inconsiderate that it could be harassing to be in their house. And he could not stop himself planning the next move ahead on the chessboard of power. I was pretty sure that the rumours about him were right, that he had not been able to resist working out the combinations for the next magisterial election. I was pretty sure that he had decided it was worth trying for Brown as Master, so that if it came off, he could walk into the Senior Tutorship himself.
That was all true. But it was not all. There was something else within him which made him a more interesting man. At its roots it might not be more amiable than those other roots which made him a hard self-seeker; but it certainly made him more surprising and more capable of good. It was something like a curious kind of self-regard. He knew as well as anyone else that he was hard, selfish, obsessively carefuclass="underline" but he knew, what no one else did, that he had sometimes wanted to be different from that. This self-regard, “romantic” if you like, had twice in his life made him step right out of his ordinary casing. He had, as it were deliberately, made an imprudent marriage, not only by his own standards but by anyone else’s. He had been more than imprudent when humanity got the better of him and, with real power waiting on his table, he had quit the atomic establishment and come back to hide himself within the college.
Now he was doing it again. Not out of patrician high principle edged with contempt, as in Skeffington. Martin, who was not such a lofty character, had no contempt for his brother men. No, out of that special kind of self-regard, tinged with and disentangleable from his feeling that he had to be responsible. He did not like being pushed so — out of the predictable, calculating life, with its pickings, small-scale but predictable for years ahead. That would be disturbed now. He did not like it: that was why he had been so bad-tempered the night before. But he was pushed, and he could not stop himself.
That was one motive. The other, it seemed to me, was much simpler. Martin was a natural politician. Inside the college, there was no one in his class, except Arthur Brown. Like anyone with a set of unusual skills, Martin enjoyed using them. This was a perfect opportunity. He felt like an opening bowler on a moist morning, his first two fingers itching for the ball. It looked to Martin a situation adapted to his talents. Skeffington would certainly mishandle it. If anyone could take it through to success, Martin could.
There was one other thing, I thought. Martin enjoyed using his political skills. As a rule, he had used them for his own purposes, sometimes petty, often selfish. It was a treat for him — and I believed that unless one understood that, one didn’t understand him or other worldly men — to think of using them for a purpose which he felt, without any subtlety or complexity at all, to be nothing but good.
10: Preoccupation of a Distinguished Scientist
AS we sat in the sunny room after Irene had cried, “I knew you would,” Martin got down to tactics. He reiterated what he had already told Skeffington, that getting a majority to re-open the case was only the start. This wasn’t the sort of argument that would be settled by “counting heads”. The essential thing was to bring in men who would “carry weight”. Could Skeffington, or Martin himself, persuade Nightingale to stay neutral? Even after the night before, Martin thought it worth trying. Above all, Francis Getliffe was a key man. Get him active, and all the scientists, the Master included, would have to listen.
Within half an hour, Martin had telephoned the Cavendish, and he and Skeffington and I were on our way there. At first I was surprised that Martin had not only asked if I would care to come with them, but pressed me to. Then I realised that he had a reason. He wanted Francis at his easiest. He knew that with me Francis still sometimes talked like a young man, like the young man I still — with the illusion that invests a friend one has known since twenty — half-thought him to be. But his juniors in the college, even Martin, did not think of him in the least like that. To them — it struck me with one of the shocks of middle-age — he had become stiff and inaccessible.