“Do you really think a scientist of international reputation, like Francis Getliffe, is quite as capable of deceiving himself on a point like this?” I said.
“I’ve got to be persuaded that he isn’t.”
“You would seriously take Nightingale’s opinion rather than Getliffe’s — that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it, G S?”
Martin was talking to him better-temperedly than I could. It struck me that there was a protective tone in Martin’s voice. I wondered — it was the kind of thing near the physical level, that one did not easily recognise in a brother — whether if, like many robust men, he wanted to turn his eyes from a cripple and so had to go out of his way to compensate.
“Yes, I think that’s fair. It amounts to that.”
“Forgetting Skeffington,” said Hanna. “Whom even you could not regard as a man of advanced opinions, I should think.”
“Forgetting Skeffington.” He brushed her aside more contentedly than anyone I had seen. “You see, I can respect Getliffe’s opinions and the Eliots’, even when I disagree with them. But I’m not going to give equivalent weight to playboys.”
“That’s special pleading,” I said.
“Take it as you like,” said Clark. “In my view, and you’re naturally at liberty to think it’s wrong, the question is very much as Martin put it. If I’ve got to take a side, I’ve got to decide between Nightingale’s opinion and Getliffe’s. Now I’d be the last person to say that Getliffe wasn’t by far the more distinguished scientist. People competent to judge have decided that for me, and of course there’s no room for reasonable doubt. But, with respect, it seems to me that their scientific merits aren’t under discussion. So far as I’m concerned, there is room for reasonable doubt about whose guidance I accept on a piece of scientific chicanery.”
“How well do you know Nightingale?” I was provoked enough to say it. As soon as I did, I knew it was a false step.
“I know them both well enough to form my own judgment. And that’s something one must do for oneself, isn’t it?” He looked around with his fresh smile, the smile edged with physical strain. “Well, we shan’t convince each other, shall we? I think this is the time to agree to differ, don’t you?”
After Clark had said that he was going to play us some Berlioz, I was left out of the party. All of the others were musical, Clark passionately so: while as soon as he had put on the record, I drifted into the kind of wool-gathering that music induced in me. On the bright wall opposite I caught sight of a couple of Piranesi prints. They set me speculating on what sort of inner life Clark had, Berlioz and Piranesi, the march to the scaffold, the prisons deep under the earth.
Why in the world had Hanna married him? Throwing over a husband, a healthy man with, I recalled, a sly eye for women, to do so. There Hanna sat, curled up on the sofa, in her mid forties, her body, lean, tense, still young, her face still young apart from the grey in her hair which, before she married Clark, when she was one of the most elegant of women, she would never have left there. Why had she married him? She was not happy here. It did not need her ambiguous relation to Tom Orbell to say she was unhappy. She had not taken Clark into her confidence, even at the start, so far as I could see. There had been a time when she was far more politically committed than he thought. When he spoke of her as in the same political grade as Francis Getliffe, he did not know what Martin and I knew.
Did he know that once she had been fond of Martin?
Yes, Martin had been fond of her in return. A good many men were roused by her sharp, shrewish charm and wanted to tame her. But though she liked such men, they were not the ones she disrupted her life for. Instead she seemed to be searching for someone to look after. It must have been that, it could only have been that, which led her to break one marriage and take on Clark.
As the music went on, I felt both indulgent to her and impatient. For, of course, the irony was that she could scarcely have picked worse. She was so brave, much more than most of us, she was intelligent, she had her farouche attractions. But she had no insight. She was a good judge of men’s intellects, but compared with a hundred stupid women she despised, she had no idea what men were like. It did not take a clairvoyant to see that, though Clark might be crippled, he had a character like a rock. Not an amiable character; one fused out of bad luck and pain, not giving pity to others, and not wanting it himself. One might help him across a room, but he would not like one the better for that. As for offering him tenderness — one ought to know that gently, inexorably, he would throw it back in one’s teeth.
Sitting there, daydreaming in the sound, I believed Hanna knew that now. She had no insight, but she learned. I was not specially sad for her. She was younger than most women of her age, she still had force and nerve and the hope of the fibres. She was capable of sacrificing herself and enduring more than others could take. In the past she had gone on with a sacrifice for years, and then come to a snapping-point. Then she had saved herself. Could she do so again?
16: The Government
WHEN the butler came into the combination room on the Sunday night and ritually announced, “Master, dinner is served,” Crawford told me that, since there were no visitors dining, I was to follow him in and sit at his right hand. As we stood in our places waiting for the grace to finish, I saw the heavy face of Arthur Brown, dead opposite to me.
It was a full Sunday night, and we had scarcely spoken in the combination room. Once we had sat down to our soup, he gave me a smile of recognition, and told me that he had already asked the Master’s permission to present a bottle after dinner to drink my health. He knew why I was in the college, but he was at the same time too warm-hearted and too cunning to let that affect his welcome. Crawford nodded, with impersonal cordiality. He liked a glass of port, he didn’t mind me, he wasn’t what Gay would have called “on the spot” as to what had been going on that weekend.
Brown gazed down the table. He noticed, just as I did, that neither Francis Getliffe nor Nightingale were dining. Martin was there, so were Tom Orbell and most of the younger Fellows: there were also several members of the college present who were not Fellows but had university jobs. Brown must have been calculating that, until and unless they dispersed, there was no chance of a show-down that night. Whether he found the thought satisfactory, I could not guess. As though it were the only trouble on his mind, he was informing the Master that Winslow’s sciatica was worse.
“Ah, well,” said Crawford, who was inclined to take a biological, or alternatively a cosmic, view of human miseries, “a man of eighty ought to expect that bits of the machine are beginning to run down.”
“I don’t think he’d find that much consolation just at present,” said Brown.
“Speaking as one trained in medicine, I should have thought he’d been remarkably lucky with his physical constitution. And with his medical history, if it comes to that I can’t think of many men who’ve lived as long and had so little wrong with them.”
“The old chap seemed rather sorry for himself when I dropped in on him before hall,” Brown said.
“That was very considerate of you, Senior Tutor,” said Crawford. Without irony at his own expense, or anyone else’s, he said: “Do you think I ought to visit him?”
Brown considered: “There’s certainly no need to put yourself out. No, I’m inclined to think he’s had enough visitors for twenty-four hours. But if you could send round a note? And perhaps a book? He complained of being short of reading matter.”
“That shall be done,” said Crawford. He kept his Buddha-like, contented smile. He was either oblivious that he was being told how to do his job, or else he accepted it. He was capable of thinking “Brown is better at these personalia than I am”, and it would not disturb him in the least.