The Conscience of the Rich (6 page)

‘I was very glad that I didn’t disgrace myself yesterday,’ he said. ‘Because one of the reasons for giving up the law wasn’t exactly pleasing to one’s self-respect. I knew it all along: I wanted to escape because I was frightened. I was frightened that I shouldn’t succeed.’

‘I don’t believe much in that,’ I said.

‘You mustn’t minimize it.’ He smiled at me. ‘Remember, I’m a much more diffident person than you are. As well as being much more spiritually arrogant. I hate competing unless I’m certain that I’m going to win. The pastime I really enjoy most is dominoes, right hand against left. So I wanted to slip out: but I should have felt cheap doing it.’

I nodded.

‘What would have happened if you hadn’t done so well yesterday?’

‘Do you think I’ve enough character to go on until I’d satisfied myself?’ He chuckled. ‘I wonder if I or anyone else could really have stuck on doggedly at the Bar until they felt sufficiently justified. It would have been rather heroic: but it would also have been slightly mad. Don’t you agree it would have been mad? No, I’m sure I should have given it up whatever had happened. But if I’d been a complete failure yesterday, I should have felt pretty inferior because I was escaping. Now I don’t, at any rate to the same extent.’ He went on: ‘Of course, you know what I think about the law.’

He meant the law as an occupation: for a time we went over our past arguments: I knew as well as he did how he found the law sterile, how he could not feel value in such a life. Then Charles said:

‘Well, those were two reasons I’ve thought about for months. You can’t dismiss them altogether. I shall always have a slight suspicion that I ran away. But, like all the other reasons one thinks about for months, they had just about as much effect on my actions as Mr L’s patent medicines have on his superb health. It was something quite different – that I didn’t need or want to think about – that made it certain I should have to break away.’

He looked straight at me.

‘I think you’ve realized it for long enough,’ he said. ‘You remember the first time I talked to you about Katherine?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was afraid afterwards that you must have noticed something,’ he said, with a grim smile. ‘It was the first time you came to our house, of course. I was very much upset because she was being sent to that dance against her will. I was pretending to be concerned only about her welfare. I was talking about her, and trying to believe that was being detached and dispassionate. You’ve done the same thing yourself, haven’t you? It was the sort of occasion when one sits with a furrowed brow trying to work out someone else’s salvation – and knows all the time that one’s talking about oneself.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Probably you understand,’ said Charles, ‘without my saying any more. But I want to explain myself. It’s curiously difficult to speak, still. Even tonight, when I’m extremely happy, I’m still not quite free.’

He said, slowly: ‘The Bar represented part of an environment that I can’t accept for myself. You see, I can’t say it simply. If I stayed at the Bar, I should be admitting that I belonged to the world’ – he hesitated – ‘of rich and influential Jews. That is the world in which most people want to keep me. Most people, both inside it and outside. If I stayed at the Bar, I should get cases from Jewish solicitors, I should become one of the gang. And people outside would dismiss me, not that they need so much excuse, as another bright young Jew. Do you think it’s tolerable to be set aside like that?’

There was a silence. He went on: ‘I haven’t enjoyed being a Jew. Since I was a child, I haven’t been allowed to forget – that other people see me through different eyes. They label me with a difference that I can’t accept. I know that I sometimes make myself feel a stranger, I know that very well. But still, other people have made me feel a stranger far more often than I have myself. It isn’t their fault. It’s simply a fact. But it’s a fact that interferes with your spirits and nags at you. Sometimes it torments you – particularly when you’re young. I went to Cambridge desperately anxious to make friends who would be so intimate that I could forget it. I was aching for that kind of personal success – to be liked for the person I believed myself to be. I thought, if I couldn’t be liked in that way, there was nothing for it: I might as well go straight back to the ghetto.’

He stopped suddenly, and smiled. He looked very tired, but full of relief.

As I listened, I was swept on by his feeling, and at the same time surprised. I had noticed something, but nothing like all he had credited me with. I had seen him wince before, but took it to be the kind of wound I had known in myself through being born poor; I too had sometimes been looking out for snubs. In me, that was not much of a wound, though: it had never triggered off a passion. Now I was swept along by his, moved and yet with a tinge of astonishment or doubt.

‘What shall you do?’ I said, after a silence. ‘Do you know what your career’s to be?’

‘Most people will assume that I intend to drift round and become completely idle.’

Then I asked if anyone else knew of his abandoning the Bar. He shook his head.

‘Mr L will be disappointed, of course,’ he said.

‘He was talking to me yesterday,’ I said. ‘He was delighted about the case. He’s set his heart on your being a success in the world.’

For a moment, Charles was angry.

‘You’re exaggerating that,’ he said. ‘You forget that he’d get equally excited if any of his relations made a public appearance of any kind.’ Then he added, in a different tone:

‘I hope you’re not right.’

I was startled by the concern which had suddenly entered his voice: he seemed affected more strongly than either of us could explain that night.

Within a few days of Charles’ visit, he told me that he had broken the news to Mr March. He also told me how Mr March had responded: he wanted to convince me that his father had accepted the position without distress. In fact, Mr March’s behaviour seemed to have been odd in the extreme.

His first reply was: ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’ This was said in a flat, dejected tone, so Charles admitted: but at once Mr March began to grumble, almost as though he were parodying himself: ‘You ought to have chosen a more suitable time to tell me. You might have known that hearing this would put me out of step for the day.’ Then he added again: ‘In any case, I don’t believe a word of it.’

For several days he refused to discuss the matter. He seemed to be pretending that he had forgotten it. At the same time, he kept asking with concern about his son’s health and spirits; one day at lunch, without any preamble, he offered Charles a handsome increase of his allowance to pay for a holiday.

Mr March still went about the house as though he had not so much as heard Charles’ intention. It was not until the next full family dinner party that he had to face it.

Each Friday night, when they were in London, Mr March and his brothers took it in turn to give a dinner party to the entire family: the entire family in its widest sense, their wives, their sisters and their sisters’ husbands, the children of them all, remoter relations. When I first knew the Marches, it was rare for a ‘Friday night’ to be attended by less than thirty, and fifty had been reached at least once since 1918.

The tradition of these parties went back continuously to the eighteenth century; for the past hundred years they had been held according to the same pattern, every week from September to the end of the London season.

As luck would have it, I was invited for that night. As a rule, friends of the family were asked only if they were staying in the house; it was by a slight extension of the principle that Mr March invited me.

Getliffe’s brother Francis, whose friendship with Charles began in their undergraduate days, had been living at Bryanston Square for the week. When I arrived there for tea on the Thursday, the drawing-room was empty. It was Francis who was the first to join me. He came in with long, plunging, masterful strides, strides too long for a shortish man. His face was clearly drawn, fastidious, quixotic, with no kind of family resemblance to Herbert’s, who was his father’s son by a first marriage. He had not a trace of Herbert’s clowning tricky matiness. Indeed, that afternoon he was nervous in the Marches’ house, though he often stayed there.

He disliked being diffident; he had trained himself into a commanding impatient manner; and yet most people at that time felt him to be delicate underneath. He was two years older than Charles; he was a scientist, and the year before had been elected a fellow of their college.

‘Will you dine with me tomorrow, Lewis?’ he asked. ‘They’ve got their usual party on here, and it’d be less trouble if I got out of the way.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Good work,’ said Francis. Then he asked, a little awkwardly, how I was getting on with his brother.

‘He’s very stimulating,’ I said.

‘I can believe that,’ said Francis. ‘But has he put you in the way of any briefs?’

‘No,’ I said.

Francis cursed, and flushed under his dark sunburnt skin. He was both a scrupulous and a kind-hearted man.

Just then Charles and Katherine came in. As we began tea, Francis said, with an exaggerated casualness: ‘By the way, I’ve arranged to dine out with Lewis tomorrow night. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? It’ll give you more room for the party.’

Katherine’s face was open in disappointment.

‘I hoped you would come,’ she said.

‘I should be in the way,’ said Francis. ‘It will definitely be much better if I disappear.’

Katherine recovered herself, and said:

‘You are more or less expected to come, you know. Mr L will say “If I am obliged to have the fellow residing in my house, I can’t send him away while we make beasts of ourselves.” He’ll certainly expect you to come.’

‘I don’t think I should do you credit,’ he said.

‘You’ll find points of interest, I promise you,’ she said.

‘I shouldn’t know many of them, you see–’

‘Look here,’ said Katherine, ‘do you want another Gentile to keep you company? I’m certain Lewis will oblige, won’t you?’

She turned to me: as I heard that gibe of hers, I felt how fond she was of him.

Since Charles had spoken to me about Jewishness, so had she. It was no longer a forbidden subject. ‘It was a bit hard,’ Katherine had said, ‘to be stopped riding one’s scooter in the Park on Saturday because it was the Sabbath, and then on Sunday too. It seemed to me monstrously unjust.’ She had gone on: ‘But the point was, you were being treated differently from everyone else. You wouldn’t have minded anything but that. As it was, you kept thinking about every single case.’ Less proud than Charles, she had talked about her moments of shame: but she was still vulnerable. It was not till she teased Francis about being a Gentile that I heard her speak equably, as though it did not matter any more.

‘It’s a bit hard on him,’ said Francis. He broke into a smile that, all of a sudden, narrowed his eyes, creased his cheeks, and made his whole expression warm: ‘I’d better tell you, I’m feeling very shy.’

Charles broke in: ‘It’ll be slightly bizarre, but you must come. Even if it’s only to oblige Lewis. I’m sure he can’t resist the temptation. Incidentally, even if it weren’t so tempting, he wouldn’t be able to refuse it.’ Charles went on: ‘Lewis is temperamentally incapable of refusing any invitation, whether he wants to go or not. Isn’t that true?’

Katherine asked Mr March as soon as he entered the house. He came into the room and invited us both. I knew he felt it irregular; he did not want either of us at a family party; but his natural warmth prevailed. ‘Eight o’clock sharp,’ he said. ‘And you must both dress suitably for once. For this occasion, I can’t possibly let you off.’

I had never seen the house anything but empty before that Friday night. Cars were drawn up bonnet to stern in the square; from the hall one heard the clash of March voices; the drawing-room was full. There was already an orchestra-like effect of voices and laughs: this was the week’s exchange of family news. Every day, the Marches told each other the latest pieces of family gossip; Mr March would meet his brother Philip at the club, Philip would tell his wife, she would ring up her children; but it was on Friday night that the stories were crystallized, argued over, and finally passed into the common stock.

Several of the characters in Mr March’s sagas were that night present in the flesh. Sir Philip, a spare man, the furrows of whose face seemed engraved not by anxiety but by a stiff, caustic humour – he took for granted his position as head of the family and here, in his brother’s house, he walked round the entire company, giving everyone a handshake and a switched-on truculent smile. Mr March’s favourite sister Caroline, and her husband Lionel Hart, a brother of Charles’ former master. Their son Robert, who, despite Mr March’s pessimistic forecasts, had been for years successfully practising in company law. Florence Simon, the cousin who ‘thought she wouldn’t like it till she tried’. A large family of Herbert Marches, the children of the youngest brother. Mr March’s eldest daughter Evelyn, plump and pleasant-looking in a different fashion from Katherine, much darker and brown-eyed. She had married the editor of a Jewish paper, who was not present. Charles and Katherine said she was happy, but Mr March sometimes referred to her marriage with gloom.

There were many unusual faces. Three or four looked, in the stereotyped sense, Jewish. Some of the older women were enormous. Both in face and figure, the party seemed the most unstandardized one could imagine. Beauty, grotesque oddity, gigantic fatness – the family went to all extremes. There was scarcely anyone there whom, for one reason or another, one would not look at twice.

Unfortunately for me, Mr March’s eldest sister, Hannah, was not there. I wanted to see her, as she entered his narrative as a symbol of disapproval and the self-appointed leader of all oppositions. There was a legend of Mr March, on his way to his honeymoon at Mentone, putting his head out of the window at Saint Raphael and sniffing the air: then he turned to his bride and said: ‘The air is quite different here. Hannah would say it isn’t, but it is.’