“I believe there must still be justice in England. You remember Frederick the Great — there are still judges in Berlin. A fine city, they gave me an honorary degree in that city. I am positive that damaging a man’s reputation cannot be done with impunity. And that ought to be true of people who have achieved some little distinction, quite as much as of anyone else. Indeed it ought. Not letting a man take a place which is his of right — that is a comment on his fitness, my dear chap, and I am absolutely convinced people cannot make such comments with impunity.”
He was becoming more obstinate. Incredulously, I began to think that he might not forget this. How far, I was calculating, with a faint suppressed schadenfreude at Arthur Brown’s expense, could he go before he was stopped?
“If I proceed against them,” said Gay, “that will be an action and a half.”
I said the situation was complicated.
“You’re too genteel, you young men.”
Gay was chuckling with gusto and malice. Oddly enough, it did not sound like senile malice. I was astonished at how much vigour he had summoned up. The prospect of litigation had made him younger by twenty years. “You’re too genteel. I’m absolutely positive that this action of mine would lie. Indeed it would. That would teach them a lesson. I don’t believe in being too genteel, my dear chap. That’s why I’ve attained a certain position in the world. It’s a great mistake, when one has attained a certain position in the world, to be too genteel about teaching people a lesson.”
15: “Never be too Proud to be Present”
THE following afternoon, Saturday, Martin rang me up in college. Some progress, he said. No special thanks to us: after Francis’ circular, we couldn’t avoid it. Anyway, two people had come over — Taylor (the Calvert Fellow) and another man I did not know. On paper the score was now ten to nine against. That is, nine men were pledged to sign the request for re-opening the case. “I think we’re pretty well bound to pick up another. Then the real fun begins,” came Martin’s voice with a politician’s mixture of optimism and warning.
For reasons of tactics — “just to show we mean business” — Martin was anxious to get the majority decided soon. Would I have a go at Tom Orbell? Would I also dine in hall and see if there was anyone I could talk to? It would be better if he and I were acting separately. We could meet later that night at his house.
I obeyed, but I drew blank. In the mizzling afternoon, so dark that the lights were on all over the college, I walked through to the third court. For an instant I looked up at Tom Orbell’s windows: I could have sworn that they were lighted too. But when I climbed the stairs his outer door was sported. I rattled the lock and called out that I was there. No response. I had a strong suspicion that Tom had seen me coming.
Frustrated, irritated, I gazed at the name above the door, “Dr T Orbell”. The letters gleamed fresh on the unlit landing. I remembered faded letters there, and the name of Despard-Smith, who had been a Fellow for fifty years. He had been a sanctimonious old clergyman. At that moment I felt a mixture of rancour and disgust; it seemed that the rancour, long suppressed, was directed at that old man, dead years before, not at Tom Orbell who kept me waiting there.
However, I met Tom before the end of the afternoon. I had been invited to tea by Mrs Skeffington, to what, I discovered when I arrived, was something very much like an old-fashioned Cambridge tea-party. That was not the only odd thing about it. To begin with, the Skeffingtons were living in one of a row of two-storied houses just outside the college walls, which used to be let to college servants. Why they were doing it, I could not imagine. They were both well-off: was this Skeffington’s notion of how a research Fellow ought to comport himself? If so, they were not making all that good a shot at it: for in the tiny parlour they had brought in furniture which looked like family heirlooms, and which some of the guests were cooing over. Sheraton? someone was asking, and Mrs Skeffington was modestly admitting: “Oh, one must have something to sit on.”
Round the wall there were pictures that did not look at all like heirlooms, and I recalled that I heard Skeffington had taste in visual things. There was a Sickert, a recent Passmore, a Kokoschka, a Nolan.
So, in the parlour, smaller than those I remembered in the back streets of my childhood, we sat on Sheraton chairs and drank China tea and ate wafers of brown bread-and-butter. Another odd thing was Mrs Skeffington’s choice of guests. I had imagined that Skeffington wanted to talk over the case with me and that everyone there would be on his side. Far from it — there was Tom Orbell, hot and paying liquid compliments, and also, though without their husbands, Mrs Nightingale and Mrs Ince. To balance them, Irene was there without Martin. Did Mrs Skeffington think it was her duty to pull the college together? Quite possibly, I thought. Not through policy. Certainly not through doubts of her husband’s case: she was as firm as he was. But quite possibly through sheer flat-footed duty, as though to the tenantry.
The case was not referred to. What was referred to, was a string of names, as though everyone were playing a specifically English kind of Happy Families. Someone mentioned an acquaintance in the Brigade: Mrs Skeffington trumped that by having known the last Colonel. County names, titled names, token names, they all chanted them as though the charmed circle were tiny and as though one kept within it by chanting in unison. And yet those who were chanting the loudest needn’t have done so. There was nothing bogus about the Skeffingtons’ social roots: Tom was the son of an Archdeacon, Irene the daughter of a soldier. I discovered that Mrs Ince, whom I rather liked, had been to a smart school. That I shouldn’t have guessed. She wore spectacles, like her husband she had adopted a mid-Atlantic accent, she was cheerful, ugly, frog-faced, and looked as if she enjoyed a good time in bed.
The only person not chanting was Mrs Nightingale. With unfailing accuracy Mrs Skeffington asked if she knew –
“Oh, no,” said Mrs Nightingale, impassive, exophthalmic.
Had she known — or—?
“Of course not,” said Mrs Nightingale with complete good temper. “We were living in Clapham Junction at the time.”
“Were you, now?” Mrs Skeffington could not help speaking as though a junction were a place that one passed through. She brightened. “Then you may have known the — s when they had one of those nice Georgian places over in the Old Town?”
“Oh, no, my father could never have lived there. That was before the big money started to come in.”
Tom guffawed. Soon afterwards he slipped out. When he found that I had followed him and caught him up on the cobbles outside, he said, in a defiant tone: “Hullo, Lewis, I didn’t know you were coming.”
I had just been quick enough to prevent him letting himself into the college by a side gate, to which I did not have a key. Instead we walked round by the wall. Under a lamp, I caught sight of his eyes, blue, flat and mutinous. I said: “What were you doing this afternoon?”
“What do you mean, what was I doing?”
“I came up to your rooms. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh, I was working very hard. I did some really good work. I was extremely pleased with it for once.”
“I’m glad of that—”
“Hanna’s always bullying me to produce more, you know she is. But you know, Lewis, I’m really producing quite as much as anyone of my age—”
He was steering the conversation into a comparison of the academic output of young historians. I interrupted: “You know what I wanted to talk about, don’t you?”