The Conscience of the Rich (13 page)

‘Can you remember the agony you went through when your father was first proved wrong?’

It was Katherine who answered her:

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We were used to the whole family proving each wrong, weren’t we?’

‘But I think I know what you mean,’ Charles was saying to Ann.

‘I’ve never forgotten,’ said Ann. ‘It was the day after my birthday – I was nine. Someone came in to dinner, a friend of mother’s. He said to my father: “You call yourself a doctor. You remember how you swore last week that the sea was blue because of the salts that it dissolved? Well, I asked one of the men at school. He laughed and said it was a ridiculous idea.” Then he gave the proper explanation. I never have been able to remember it to this day.’ Ann went on: ‘I’ve re-learned it several times, but it’s no good. I told myself in bed that night that of course father was right. But I knew he wasn’t. I knew people were laughing because he didn’t know why the sea was blue. Every time I remembered that night for years, I wanted to shut my eyes.’

Charles said to Katherine: ‘We know what that’s like, don’t we?’ He turned back to Ann. ‘But when I’ve felt like that, it wasn’t over quite the same things.’

‘Not over your father?’

Charles hesitated, and said: ‘Not in the same way.’

‘What was it about then?’

‘Mostly about being a Jew,’ said Charles.

‘Curiously enough,’ said Ann, ‘I never felt that.’

‘Which is no doubt why I met you,’ said Charles, ‘on my one and only appearance at the Jewish dance.’

He looked at me; this was the trick of fortune I had not recognized that afternoon. He was smiling at his own expense, and his expression, sarcastic and gay, brought back the first night I dined at Bryanston Square, when he talked ‘with a furrowed brow’ of Katherine being sent to the dance. Tonight he seemed free of that past.

‘You were lucky to escape,’ said Charles. ‘There’ve been times when I’ve disliked other Jews – simply because I suffered through being one.’

‘Yes,’ said Katherine.

‘I couldn’t help it, but it was degrading to feel oneself doing it,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Katherine again.

‘I think you would have behaved better,’ Charles said to Ann.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve hated my father sometimes because of the misery I’ve been through on his account.’

We all confided about our childhoods, but it was Charles and Ann, and sometimes Katherine, who spoke most about the moments of shame – not grief or sorrow, but shame. The kind of shame we all know, but which had been more vivid to them than to most of us: the kind of shame which, when one remembers it, makes one stop dead in one’s tracks, and jam one’s eyelids tight to shut it out.

They went on with those confidences until Ann went to bed. It was late, and Francis followed not long after. Katherine made an excuse and ran out, and from the drawing-room Charles and I heard her speak to Francis at the bottom of the stairs. For several minutes we heard their voices. Then Katherine rejoined us, and gave Charles a radiant smile. We opened the long windows, and walked on to the terrace. It was an August night of extreme beauty, the moon just about to rise over the hills. A meteor flashed among the many stars to the south.

No one spoke. Katherine threw her arm round Charles’ shoulders, smiled at him, and sighed.

Early in October, when the March household had returned to London, Katherine started gossip percolating through the family, just by having Francis Getliffe three or four times to dinner at Bryanston Square. We speculated often upon when the gossip would reach Mr March: we became more and more puzzled as to whether he was truly oblivious.

On an autumn night, warm and misty, with leaves sometimes spinning down in the windless air, Charles and I were walking through the square. He had not been talking much. Out of the blue he said:

‘I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

‘What is it?’

He was speaking with diffidence, with unusual stiffness.

‘I don’t want you to say yes out of good-nature. It may be too much of an intrusion–’

‘If you tell me what it is–’

‘I don’t want you to say yes on the spot.’

‘What in God’s name is it?’

At last he said: ‘Well, we wondered whether you could bear it, if Ann and I met in your rooms–’

He produced timetables, which he had been thinking out, so I suspected, for days beforehand, of how they could fit in with my movements, of how they need not inconvenience me.

Up to that night he had said nothing about Ann. Hearing him forced to break his secretiveness open, I was both touched and amused. I was amused also to find him facing a problem that vexed me and my impoverished friends when I was younger – of ‘somewhere to go’ with a young woman. In our innocence we thought the problem would have solved itself if we had money. While in fact Charles, with all the March houses at his disposal, could get no privacy at all – less than we used to get in the dingy streets of the provincial town.

Walking with Charles that night, and other nights that autumn, I felt as one does with a friend in love – protective, superior, a little irritated, envious. His tongue was softened by happiness. He was full of hopes. Those hopes! He would not have dared to confess them. He would have blushed because they were so impossibly golden, romantic – and above all vague. They had no edge or limit, they were just a vista of grand, continuing, and perfect rapture.

Charles was by nature both guarded and subtle. His imagination was a realistic one. If I had confessed any such hopes as uplifted him that autumn, he would have riddled them with sarcasm. They would have sounded jejune by contrast to his own style. Yet now he fed on them for hours, they were part of the greatest happiness he had ever known.

As the autumn passed, I saw a good deal of Charles and Ann together. Inquisitive as I was, I did not know for certain what was happening to them. Then one evening when I returned to my flat they were still there. They were sitting by the fire; they greeted me; they did not tell me anything. Yet looking at them I felt jealous because they were so happy.

Ann said, gazing round the room as though she was noticing it for the first time: ‘Why does Lewis make this place look like a station waiting-room?’ Charles smiled at her, and she went on: ‘We ought to take care of him for once, oughtn’t we? Let’s take care of him.’

She spoke with the absorbed kindness of the supremely happy: kindness which was not really directed towards me, but which was an overflow of her own joy.

I thought then that it had taken Ann longer than anyone else to recognize that she was in love: though from that afternoon at Haslingfield the barriers dropped away, and she gave him her trust. She had not known before that she could let the barriers fall like that; except with her father, she had not entrusted herself to another human being. To all of us round her, there seemed no doubt about it; each moment she was living through had become enhanced. Yet it was some time before she said to herself: ‘I am in love.’

Of course, that conscious recognition to oneself – particularly in a character like Ann’s – is a more important stage than we sometimes allow. Until it has happened, this present desire may still swim with others, there are plenty more we have never brought to light. But when once it is made conscious, there is no way of drawing back; the love must be lived out.

That moment, when Ann first thought ‘I am in love’ (to Charles it happened at once, during the weekend at Haslingfield), was more decisive for them than the dates which on the surface seemed to mark so much: of the first kiss, of when they first made love. Seeing them that night, when it was all settled, I guessed that it came later than the rest of us suspected: and that, as soon as it came, there was no retreat. They knew – they told each other with the painful and extreme pleasure of surrender – that fate had caught them.

A day or two after I had watched Charles and Ann in my own sitting-room, she took me out to dinner alone. She took me out to a sumptuous dinner; shy as she could be, she was used to making her money work for her, and she led me to a corner table in Claridge’s; more unashamed of riches than Charles, more lavish and generous, she persuaded me to eat an expensive meal and drink a bottle of wine to myself. Meanwhile she was getting me to talk about Charles.

For a time I was reticent. He was too secretive to tolerate being discussed, even with her, perhaps most of all with her.

Very gently she said: ‘All I should like to know is what
you
think he really wants.’ She did not mean about herself: that was taken for granted and not mentioned all night. There she was as delicate and proud as he was; she did not even suggest that they would get married. But about the rest of his life she was tender and not so delicate. She wanted anything she could learn about him which would help him. As she pressed me, her face open, her manner affectionate and submissive, I could realize the core of will within her.

What had he been like when I first knew him? What had he thought of doing with himself? What had he really felt when he gave up the Bar?

‘He would always have hated the Bar,’ I said. ‘He was dead right to get out of it.’

‘Of course he was,’ said Ann.

‘And yet,’ I said, ‘he’s not so unambitious as he seems.’

‘Aren’t you reading yourself into him?’ she said, suddenly sharp.

‘Do you think he likes being idle?’ I retorted.

‘Don’t you think’ – she was gazing straight at me – ‘there are other ways of not being idle?’

She took up the attack.

‘Would you really say,’ she went on, ‘that he wants success on the terms that you want it, or most other men do?’

I hesitated.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not quite.’

‘Not quite?’ She was smiling. As she asked the question, I knew how tenacious and passionate she was.

‘Not at all. Not in the ordinary sense,’ I had to admit.

She smiled again, sitting relaxed in her corner. Once more she asked me in detail what he had done about giving up the Bar. She needed anything I could tell her about him; nothing was trivial; she was bringing her whole self to bear. When she had finished with me, she became silent. It was some time afterwards before she said:

‘Have you got an idea of what he really wants?’

‘Has he?’

She would not answer; but I was sure she thought he had. Alone with her, I knew for certain how single-minded her love was. She had no room for anyone but him. She liked me, she was friendly and comradely, she had good manners, she wanted to know how I was getting on: but really this was a business dinner. She was securing me as an ally, just because I was his intimate friend: she was picking my brains: that was all.

I was thinking, I had never seen her flirt. Only once had I seen her so much as give any meaning to another man’s name: that was the first afternoon at Haslingfield, when Charles was baiting her and she replied by praising Ronald Porson. She had done it to defend herself, to provoke Charles. Apart from that, although she was admired by several other men, she had not let Charles worry about them.

Actually Porson was pressing her to marry him. She had talked of him to me once: he had meant little to her, but he had been infatuated with her for years: she felt a last shred of responsibility for him on that account. She found it hard to say the final no. From her description, he seemed to be an eccentric, violent character, and I thought that perhaps his oddity had found some niche in her imagination.

That night at Claridge’s, I was on the point of asking her about him, when by chance I said something about politics. At once she was on to it; she was eager to discover whether I was an ally there also. In a few minutes I discovered that she was not playing. This was not just a rich young woman’s fancy.

I had not been able to understand her outburst at Haslingfield; I was still puzzled by it, after this talk with her alone; but at least I respected her in a way that I had not reckoned on. Most of the radicalism of the younger Marches I could not take seriously, after being brought up in a different climate, the climate of those born poor. But Ann was different again.

As we argued that night, I could not help but see that there was nothing dilettante about her. This was real politics. She knew more than I did. She was more committed.

I respected her: on many things we agreed: it was a curious pleasure to agree on politics, to see her pretty face across the table, to feel that her warmth and force were on one’s side. But, even then, it seemed a bit of a mystery. Much more so when I thought about it in cold blood. Why did politics mean so much to her? Why was she like this? What was she after?

I could not find any sort of answer. To another of that night’s mysteries I did however get an answer – when, just before Christmas, I came back to my room late in the evening. As I got to the landing, I saw a crack of light under the door. When I went in, I had an impression they had waited for me. Ann was sitting in a chair by the fire, Charles on the rug at her feet. She was running her fingers through his hair. They went on talking as I laid down a brief. For an instant, I fancied I caught the words from Ann ‘when you’ve finished at hospital’. I thought I must have misheard. But, as I came to sit down in the other armchair, she used the same phrase, unmistakably, again.

It seemed to me fantastic. It seemed so fantastic that I was just going to ask. But Ann then said: ‘We’re thinking that Charles might become a doctor.’

‘That’s going a bit far,’ said Charles, who was in high spirits. But chiefly I noticed Ann’s pleasure – soft, intense, youthful.

‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea?’ she said.

Charles teased her for her enthusiasm, but she did not let it go. ‘You wanted him to know, didn’t you?’ she said.

‘It’s only the barest possibility, you understand?’ said Charles to me.

‘But he wants to hear what you think.’ Ann also was speaking to me.

Charles insisted that we keep secret even the most remote mention of the idea. As she promised, a smile flickered on Ann’s happy face, and the sight of it made Charles, after an instant’s lag and as though reluctantly, smile too.