“All right?” said Martin.
Howard raised his eyes and Martin was satisfied. The classroom clock showed five to six, and he said that it was time to go out for a drink. As he led us out of the room, Martin said: “All aboard,” like a cricket captain calling his men out to field, or like an old leader of mine before we went into court. He could put on that kind of heartiness very easily. That evening, it worked better with Howard than anything I could have done. In the pub, he was less suspicious than I had seen him. It was a new and shining pub, as bright, as freshly built as the school. Among the chromium plate and the pin-tables, Howard sank into a corner as though he were for the time being safe, and put down a pint of bitter. The second tankard was soon in front of him, and he was replying almost good-naturedly to Martin, who had abandoned his normal carefulness and was questioning him head on. Did he like teaching? Yes, said Howard surprisingly, he wouldn’t have minded making his career at it. Why had he settled in a Cambridge school? Was it just to embarrass the college? Howard, who had previously shown no sense of humour, thought that was a good joke.
Martin, who had drunk a couple of pints himself, asked if he were deliberately following the good old college pattern. There had only been one other Fellow in living memory who had ever been dismissed. Did Howard know the story? Howard, prepared to think Martin a remarkably good comedian, said no. Martin said that he was disappointed. He had hoped Howard was following suit. The story was that during the ’90s, the college had elected someone from outside, actually from as far away as Oxford, as a Fellow. He had turned out to be an alcoholic of a somewhat dramatic kind, and his pupils, attending for supervision at five o’clock, had found him not yet out of bed and with empty bottles on the floor. So the college sacked him. He had promptly married a publican’s daughter and set up in a fish-and-chip shop two hundred yards from the college’s side gate. I remembered hearing the story used, forty years later, by one of the old men as an argument against electing a Fellow from outside.
“Don’t you admit the precedent is rather close?” Martin said to Howard. “You must have decided that by staying in Cambridge you could make more of a nuisance of yourself. Now didn’t you?”
“Oh, well,” said Howard, “if I’d cleared out it would have made things easier for them. I was damned if I could see why I should.”
That reminded me of another question, which Nightingale had brought up at the Lodge.
“In that case,” I said, “I wonder you didn’t think of appealing to the Visitor, and then bringing an action for wrongful dismissal.”
“I did think of it.”
“Why didn’t you bring it, then?”
“Should I have won it?”
“I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t have made things easier for them, would it?”
He hedged. He did not want to answer straight. I was nothing like so good with him as Martin was. He prevaricated, became embarrassed and wrapped up in his own thoughts. He said that he had preferred other methods. I did not begin to understand why he was suddenly so shy. I asked again: “I should have thought, when nothing happened, you might have brought an action?”
“I wasn’t keen on washing this kind of dirty linen in public.” That was all I could get out of him. After we had all three taken a bus into the town, he left us in the Market Place. He offered to drop my bag in the college, where I was sleeping, since I wanted to go off with Martin to have supper at his house.
“Do you mind?” I said.
“Do I mind putting my head in the porter’s lodge,” said Howard, prickly but not at his most offensive, “is that what you mean? The answer is, I don’t.”
As Martin and I were walking towards the Backs, Martin said: “Not as useful as it might have been, was it?” He meant the last few hours.
“Have you ever got anything more out of him?”
“Nothing to speak of.” Martin went on: “I suppose we might have got someone more difficult to work for, but off-hand I can’t think of one.”
Then he asked, how was I going to handle Francis Getliffe next day? He thought I ought to come right out in the open, and say that we should probably never be able to prove our case “down to the last drawing-pin”. Without the second photograph we could not do it. With a man like Francis, it would be a mistake to minimise the difficulties or try to cover up where we were weak.
As we planned, each of us felt kinship and a curious kind of support. It was comforting — it was more than comforting, it was an active pleasure — to be at one, to be using our wits on the same side.
13: Turns Across the Lawn
THE next morning after breakfast, I was looking out of the guest room window into the Fellows’ garden when Francis Getliffe arrived. The trees were bare, the branches were not stirring. It seemed to be a windless day with the cloud-cap very low. Francis said that it was warm outside, we might as well walk in the garden, I should not need a coat.
The turf was soft with rain, still springy under our feet, brilliant as moss. In the flower-bed to our right I could not see a single flower, not even the last of the snowdrops. We were walking slowly, but Francis nevertheless moved with lunging strides, a foot longer than mine, although he was two or three inches the shorter man.
We had not gone far, we had not gone out of the formal garden into the “wilderness”, when Francis said: “I think I know what you’ve come for.”
“Do you?”
“It doesn’t really need an inspired guess, does it?” Then he said, stiffly and proudly, “I’m going to save you a certain amount of trouble. I’d better say straight away that I regard myself as very much to blame. I’m sorry that I’ve delayed so long. There’s no doubt about it, Martin and Skeffington have produced a case that no one has got a serious answer to yet. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell them so, when they first came to see me. The sooner this business is cleared up, the better.”
I felt a sense of anticlimax, a sense of absurd let-down, as though I had put my shoulder against a door which was on the latch. Also I felt embarrassed, because Francis was so ashamed of himself, stiff with me because he was ashamed.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“It’s done.”
“What have you done?”
“I’ve just sent this out. It went off before I came to see you.”
“This” was a mimeographed note with “Confidentiaclass="underline" to All Fellows” in the top left-hand corner. It read: “I have now studied the new evidence relating to the thesis and publications of D C Howard and the notebooks of the late C J B Palairet, FRS. In my view, Dr Skeffington is right in representing that there is a case to answer. I think it is urgent that the college should request the Court of Seniors to consider this case without delay. FEG. 19.2.54.”
This note, as I knew, would be taken round by the college messenger. It would reach most of the Fellows by the lunchtime delivery, and all of them that day.
“I should have thought,” I said, “that ought to collect the majority for re-opening the case, anyway.”
“I should hope so,” Francis said.
“I notice you don’t say that you’re a hundred per cent convinced yourself?”
“That was as far as I felt inclined to go.”
In silence we walked through to the inner lawn, right at the bottom of the garden, close to the college wall. In the greenhouse in the corner great carnations shone into the aqueous morning, into the green and grey. Francis suddenly broke out, his voice tight with anger: “This man Howard must be as stupid as they come.”