The Conscience of the Rich (30 page)

The room was quiet. Then Mr March cried out: ‘My son has done this.’

Katherine said: ‘It’s an outrage. It must be Ann. Don’t you agree that it must be Ann? Charles told me that she wrote for them–’

Mr March said: ‘He must have known her intentions and he is responsible for it all. He is responsible for it all.’

I broke in: ‘I’m sure that is not true. God knows this is bad enough. But I’m sure neither of them knew it was coming. Charles knew nothing last night. Unless he’s read this thing today, he still knows nothing now.’

‘How can you speak for my son?’ Mr March shouted.

I said: ‘If he has done this he would have told you. He couldn’t have made himself speak to you as he did last night, if he knew this was on the way. It’s not in his nature.’

I had spoken with insistence, and Mr March sat silent, huddled in his chair, his chin sunk in his breast.

I had to go on speaking. I tried to explain, without making excuses for Ann, what had happened. I said that she was on the point of going to the
Note
and asking them to keep the story out. After the threat at the end of this piece, it was imperative to say nothing which might make it harder for her.

Mr March gave a sullen nod of acquiescence, but he was looking at me as though I were an enemy, not a friend.

He said: ‘I shall judge my son by his actions now. That is all that I can do.’

Katherine said: ‘This is her fault. She’s not content with crippling Charles. Now she’s trying to damage the rest of us. I wish to God she’d never set foot in this house.’

Mr March said quietly: ‘I wished that the first moment I saw her. I have never been able to forgive him for marrying her.’

As soon as I arrived back in London, I telephoned to Ann. She had already seen the issue, she said, and spoken to Seymour. He had guaranteed that nothing more would be published on the story for four weeks: he was himself going to Paris for a fortnight, picking up news, but he would be ready to discuss the problem with her as soon as he returned, and with Charles also if he liked to come along.

‘You’ll do it,’ I said, ‘the minute he gets back?’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s not putting you off while he slips something in?’

‘He wouldn’t do that to me.’ Her reply sounded constrained, on the defensive: she did not like my being so suspicious: she could feel that I suspected something else. I thought it more likely than not that Seymour had already got the first piece in without giving her a chance to see it. She resented any such thought: when she gave her trust, as she did to Seymour, she gave it without reserve. Yet she went on to ask me a favour: when she and Charles arranged the meeting with Seymour, would I come too? I was puzzled: what use could I be, I said. She stuck to it. She said, as was true, that I had given Seymour legal advice once or twice; on some things, she went on, he might listen to me.

When Seymour got back, he raised no objection. On the contrary, he rang up on the day they had fixed for the talk, and invited me himself, in his high-spirited, easy, patrician voice. I might even call for him after dinner at the
Note
office, he suggested.

So I duly climbed the five flights of stairs, in the murk and the smell of shavings and mildew. The
Note
office was at the top of a house just off the Charing Cross Road: on the other floors were offices of art photographers, dingy solicitors, something calling itself a trading company: on the fifth landing, in two rooms, was produced – not only edited but set up, duplicated, and distributed – the
Note
. In one of the rooms a light was burning, as Seymour’s secretary was still working there, at half past eight. She was working for nothing, as I knew, a prettyish girl with a restless smile. Humphrey (she enjoyed being in the swim, calling him by his Christian name) had been called away, she said, but he was expecting us all at his flat in Dolphin Square.

When at last I got there, he was alone. He was a short, cocky, confident man, nearly bald, although he was no older than Charles; he was singularly ugly, with a mouth so wide that it gave him a touch of the grotesque. His manner was warm and amiable. He put a drink into my hand and led me outside on to the terrace; his flat was high up in the building, and from the terrace one could look down over all western London, the roofs shining into the sunset. But Seymour did not look down: he did not refer to why I was there: he just launched, with a kind of obsessive insistence mixed with his habitual jauntiness, into what he had been hearing in Paris, whom he had seen, what he had been learning about the Spanish war. When I made a remark, he kept up a sighing noise which indicated that he had more to say.

At last I managed to get in my own preoccupation. He was an easy man to be off-hand with, because he was so off-hand and confident himself. I said: ‘What about this campaign?’

‘What campaign?’

‘The one that Ann March and Charles are coming about.’

‘Oh that.’ He gave a gnome-like grin.

‘Why did you start on Philip March at all?’

‘Do you think we’re really interested in him?’ said Seymour with cheerful contempt. ‘He’s never been more than a city figurehead. No, the chaps we’re really interested in are Hawtin and his pals. I think we might be able to put them on the spot, don’t you?’

I asked him – what facts had he really got hold of? About Philip March? About Hawtin? What facts were there, beside those about the Getliffe dealings?

Seymour grinned again, but did not answer. Instead he said: ‘Should you say old March cut any ice among that gang?’ (‘That gang’ meant the people who had the real power, the rulers, the establishment: Seymour, like other communists I knew, had a habit of breaking into a curious kind of slang: from him, in his cultivated tone, it sounded odd.)

‘That’s the sort of thing
you
know,’ I said.

‘Hawtin’s quite a different cup of tea,’ said Seymour. ‘Now he does cut some ice, and if we get his blood the rest of the gang will feel it, won’t they now?’

I asked again, what facts had he got about Hawtin? And when was the next instalment due to appear? To the second question, he gave a straight answer. Not for some weeks. They were not ready yet. If they had to delay for months rather than weeks, he might repeat what he had already printed – ‘just to remind some of our friends that we’re still thinking about them.’

It was the same answer as he had given to Ann: so there was time, I thought. Meanwhile, as we waited for Ann and Charles, Seymour went on talking, dismissing the ‘Hawtin racket’, elated and obsessed by ‘stories’ which, to him, mattered out of comparison more.

Below us, the haze of London was changing from blue to grey as night fell, and through the haze the lights were starting out. From second to second a new light quivered through, now in the Pimlico streets beneath us, now on the skyline. Soon there was a galaxy of lights. It made me think of the press of human lives, their struggles and their peace.

The bell of Seymour’s flat rang, and on his way to open the door he switched on his own lights. Outside in the passage were standing Ann and Charles. Seymour grinned up at Charles.

‘Late bill,’ he said. It was a recognition-symbol, a token of their days at school: I had heard Seymour use it before as a kind of upper-class password.

As we sat down, all of us except Seymour were unrelaxed: but he, just as confidently as he had done with me, started talking: his trip, the ‘low-down’ which he had collected, he went on just as with me. It took Ann an effort to say: ‘Look, Humphrey, do you mind if we get this over!’

Her voice was tight. I could feel how much she respected him. On his side, he was at once polite and considerate. ‘Of course, we’d better if you want to,’ he said with a kind, friendly, praising smile.

‘I think I’ve got to bring up this Philip March story,’ she said.

‘Right,’ said Seymour.

Though she looked strained, she began her appeal with extreme lucidity. It was agreed by everyone, wasn’t it, she said, that Philip March had had nothing whatever to do with any recent dealings? Seymour nodded his head. Philip March was absolutely in the clear, she said; last year’s rumours had nothing to do with him? Seymour nodded. If she herself hadn’t brought in the name of Herbert Getliffe, and an almost forgotten piece of gossip, no one would have remotely considered any smear against Philip March?

‘Absolutely true,’ said Seymour. ‘I was just telling Lewis, he never seriously counted, with all due respect to your family, Charles.’

He was sitting back with one leg crossed over the other. For all his cockiness and the tincture of the grotesque, he was a man in whom one could feel authority. It was an authority that did not come just from his commitment, from his position in the party: it was the authority of his nature. Even Charles, leaning forward on the sofa, watching him with hard eyes, paid attention to it. Certainly Ann, more given than Charles to admit authority in others, recognized it. She sat with her backbone straight as a guardsman’s by Charles’ side, and said: ‘Well then, I shouldn’t ask for anything impossible. I shouldn’t ask to call off anything that was important. But it isn’t important, is it? I didn’t even know that anyone would think it worth while to revive the Getliffe business. I should have thought it was too long ago to count. I should have thought whatever Philip March did or didn’t do at that time, it was too long ago to count. And anyway it’s more obscure than the Getliffe business, we couldn’t get it cut and dried. I think there would be pretty strong arguments for leaving him alone, in any case. But of course we want him left alone because it’s bound to affect my husband’s family. It’s not often that one can ask for special treatment, is it? I think I can, this time.’

Seymour smiled at her, and said: ‘There isn’t any such thing as private news, is there?’

She repeated ‘I think I can, this time’, because his tone was so light that it did not sink in. It took her seconds to realize that he had turned her down flat.

Charles had realized at once. In a harsh and angry voice he said: ‘You admit that you’ve got no foundation at all for any scandal last year – as far as my uncle is concerned. You admit the same about Herbert Getliffe, don’t you? Is there any foundation for the scandal at all, even about this man Hawtin? Or are you just wishing that it happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Seymour.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘Precisely what I say.’

Bitterly Charles went on with his questions. About 1935 there was nothing proved or provable at all: it seemed most likely that there was nothing in the rumour. But, as Seymour said jauntily, the 1929 dealings were on the record – the transactions of Getliffe’s brothers-in-law and, as he hoped to demonstrate, those of Philip March.

‘You’re proposing to use those, in fact,’ said Charles, ‘to give a bit of credibility to a sheer lie?’

‘That’s putting it rather more strongly than I should myself. If there was jiggery-pokery some years ago, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t have been some last year.’

‘But you’re really pretty certain that there wasn’t?’

Seymour shrugged his shoulders.

‘I must say,’ said Charles, ‘it’s more dishonest even than I thought.’

‘I shan’t have time for your moral sensitivity,’ said Seymour, his voice suddenly as passionate as Charles’, ‘until we’ve beaten the fascists and got a decent world.’

In the angry silence I put in: ‘If you’re seriously proposing to print rumours without even a scrap of evidence, the paper isn’t going to last very long, is it?’

‘Why in God’s name not?’

‘What’s going to stop a crop of libel actions?’

‘The trouble with you lawyers,’ said Seymour, jaunty once more, ‘is that you never know when a fact is a fact, and you never see an inch beyond your noses. I am prepared to bet any of you, or all three if you like, an even hundred pounds that no one,
no one
, brings an action against us over this business. Trust old Father Mouse and bob’s your uncle.’

He went on, enjoying himself: ‘While I’m about it, I’m prepared to bet you that the paper never runs into a libel action. You trust old Father Mouse. I’m nothing like as wild and woolly as I seem. No, the only thing that could ever finish the paper is that we might come up against the Official Secrets Act. That’s the menace, and if we had bad luck that would be the end. I don’t suppose I’m telling any of you anything you don’t know. Anyway, Ann’s seen how we collect some of our stuff and she must have enough documents in her own desk to finish the poor old paper off in a couple of hours.’

It sounded like an indiscretion, like a piece of his cocksureness. Listening, I believed it was the opposite. He had done it deliberately. He was not the man to underestimate just how competent and ruthless other people could be. He took it for granted that Ann and Charles knew that she had it in her power to kill the paper; he took it for granted too, that, after his refusal, having no other conceivable way to protect Charles’ family, they would consider it.

He knew her well. It would have been stupid to hide anything, it was good tactics to bring the temptation into the open, brandish it in front of her and defy her with it. He knew, of course, that she was as much committed to the party as he was himself. Outside her marriage, it was her one devotion. It was so much a devotion – only a religious person could know something similar in kind, perhaps – that she had not been shocked when Seymour admitted that he was fabricating a set of scandals. To Charles, it was a moral outrage. To her, so upright in her own dealings, it was not. Any more, oddly enough, than it was to Seymour himself. Both she and Seymour were believers by nature. At times it gave them a purity and innocence that men like Charles never knew: at times it gave Seymour, and perhaps even Ann, a capacity to do things from which Charles, answering to his own conscience, would have been repelled.

As Seymour told Ann that she could ruin the paper next day, I watched her glance at Charles. Their faces were set, but their eyes met with recognition, with understanding.