The Conscience of the Rich (2 page)

‘I see,’ said Charles. ‘Yes, it’s too much to invest in one chance. Of course it is.’ He paused. ‘You’ve done pretty well, of course, you know that, don’t you? I’m sure you have.’ He pointed to the examination paper, still lying on the tablecloth. ‘You’re pretty confident up to a point, aren’t you? Whether you’ve done well enough – I don’t see that anyone can say.’

He gave me no more assurance than I could stand. It was exactly what I wanted to hear said. The tea-shop had grown darker as the sun dipped behind the buildings across the street. We both felt very much at ease. Charles suggested that we should have a meal and go to a theatre; he hesitated for a moment. Then he said: ‘I should like you to be my guest tonight.’ I demurred: because of the flicker, just for an instant, of some social shame. I remembered the things I usually forgot, that he was rich, elegantly dressed, with an accent, a manner in ordering tea, different from mine. Hurriedly Charles said: ‘All right. I’ll pay for the meal and you can buy the tickets. Do you agree? Will that be fair?’ For a few minutes we were uncomfortable. Then Charles went to telephone his father’s house, and came back with a friendly smile. Our ease returned. We walked through the streets towards the west, tired, relaxed, talkative. We talked about books. Charles had just finished the last volume of Proust. We talked about politics; we made harsh forecasts full of anger and hope. It was 1927, and we were both twenty-two.

He took me to a restaurant in Soho. Carefully, he studied the menu card; he looked up from it with a frown; he asked if his choice would suit me and ordered a modest dinner for us both. I knew that he had not forgotten my reluctance to be treated. But now, as we sat by the window (below, the first lights were springing up in the warm evening), his meticulous care seemed familiar, a private joke.

An hour later, we were walking down Shaftesbury Avenue to the theatre. When we arrived at the box office, Charles said: ‘Just a minute.’ He spoke to the girl inside: ‘We asked you to keep seats for Mr Lewis Eliot. Have you got them ready?’

He turned to me, and said in an apologetic tone: ‘I thought of it when I was ringing up my father. I decided we might as well be safe. You don’t mind too much, do you?’

He stood aside from the grille in order that I could pay for the tickets. The girl gave them to me in an envelope. They were for the pit.

I could not help smiling as I joined him; his manoeuvres seemed now even more of a joke. They had made it impossible for me to be extravagant, that was all. As he caught my eye he also began to smile. As we stood in the foyer people passed us, one couple breaking into grins at the sight of ours.

We took our places as the house was filling up. The orchestra was playing something sweet, melancholy, and facile. I did not make an attempt to listen, but suddenly the music took me in charge. As I sat down, I had begun to think again of the examination – but on the instant all anxieties were washed away. Not listening as a musician would, but simply basking in the sound, I let myself sink into the sensation that all I wanted had come to pass. The day’s apprehension disappeared within this trance; luxury and fame were drifting through my hands.

Then, just before the curtain went up, I glanced at Charles. Soon the play started, and his face was alive with attention; but for a second I thought that he, whom I had so much envied a few hours before, looked careworn and sad.

The results of the examination were published about a month later. I had done just well enough to be given a scholarship; Charles was lower in the list but still in the first class, which, in view of the amount of work he had done, was a more distinguished achievement than mine.

In September we began our year as pupils and at once saw a good deal of each other. Charles met me the first day I came to London, and our friendship seemed to have been established a long time. He continued to ask about my affairs from where we left off on the night of the examination.

‘You’re settled for this year, anyway? You’ve got £150? You can just live on that, can’t you?’

He got me to tell him stories of my family; he soon formed a picture of my mother and chuckled over her. ‘She must have been an admirable character,’ said Charles. But he volunteered nothing about his own family or childhood. When I asked one night, his manner became stiff. ‘There’s nothing that you’d find particularly interesting,’ he said.

He kept entertaining me at restaurants and clubs. One evening he had to give me his telephone number; only then did he admit that he had been living since the summer in his father’s house in Bryanston Square. It was strange to feel so intimate with a friend of one’s own age, and yet be shut out.

We entered different chambers: I went to Herbert Getliffe and he to someone called Hart, whom I knew by reputation as one of the ablest men at the Common Law Bar. The first weeks in chambers, for me at least, were lonely and pointless; there was nothing to do, and I was grateful when Getliffe appeared and with great gusto recommended some irrelevant book, saying, ‘You never know when it will come in handy.’ I was under-worked and over-anxious. I had taken two small rooms at the top of a lodging-house in Conway Street, near the Tottenham Court Road. Charles, guessing my state, drove round and fetched me out several nights a week. I wanted to discover why he, too, was harassed.

We each knew that the other was troubled when alone: we each knew that his secretiveness hurt me: yet those first nights in London and in Charles’ company were in some ways the most exhilarating I had spent. For a young provincial, the life in London took on, of course, a glamour of its own. Restaurants and theatres and clubs were invested with a warm, romantic haze. And we saw them in a style different from anything I had experienced. The prickliness of the examination evening did not last; it was not much like me, anyway. If we were to go out at all, Charles had to pay.

I noticed that, after he had stopped protecting my feelings, he was not extravagant nor anything approaching it. At bottom, I thought, his tastes were simpler than mine. We ate and went out at night in a decent but not excessive comfort: Soho restaurants, the Carlton Grill, a couple of clubs, the circle and the back row of the stalls. It was decent and not luxurious; it was a scale of living that I had not yet seen.

All that helped. I liked pleasure and good things: and it meant more to me than just the good things themselves; it meant one side, a subsidiary but not negligible side, of the life I wanted to win. Like most young men on the rise, I was a bit of a snob at heart.

In fact, however, I should have gained almost as much exhilaration if I had been walking with Charles through the streets of my own town. There, in the past years as a student, I had made other intimate friends. But the closest of them was a very different person from myself; he saw the world, the people round him, his own passions, in a way which seemed strange to my temperament and which I had to learn step by step. While with Charles, right from our first meeting, I felt that he saw himself and other people much as I did; and he never exhausted his fund of interest.

That was the real excitement, during the first months of our friendship. The picture of those early nights which remained in my memory bore no reference to the dinners and shows, much as I gloated in them; instead, I remembered walking together down Regent Street late one night.

We had just left a coffee stall. Charles carried a mackintosh over his arms, he was stooping a little. He had begun to talk about the characters of Alyosha and Father Zossima. Didn’t I think that no other writer but Dostoyevsky could have conveyed goodness in people as one feels it in them? That this was almost the only writer who had an immediate perception of goodness? Why could we accept it from him and doubt it from anybody else?

I could feel the fascination goodness held for him. I recognized what he meant; but at that age I should not have thought of it for myself. We began to argue, with a mixture of exasperation and understanding that often flared up between us. On the one side: isn’t it just sentimentality carried out with such touch and such psychological imagination that we swallow it whole? On the other: aren’t people like that, even if we choose to see their motives differently, even if we are sceptical about what goodness really means? Then Charles turned to me: his eyes were brighter than ever. They were dark grey, very sharp and intelligent.

‘We’re each feeling the other’s right,’ he said. ‘The next time I talk about this, I shall appropriate most of what you’re saying now – if you’re safely out of the way. And you’ll do the same, don’t you admit it?’

As each day passed in chambers, I looked forward to the evening; but slowly I was managing to occupy myself, and I discovered several odd jobs to do for Getliffe, who soon began to keep me busy. It became clear that Charles was still idle. He seemed to be reading scarcely any law, and I knew quite early that he was unhappy about his career. He spoke of Hart with a kind of lukewarm respect, but was far more eager to hear my stories of Getliffe.

During those months, I still did not know when to expect Charles’ concealments. His family, childhood – yes, as we spoke the blank came between us. About women and love and sex, he was franker than I was and knew more. He was not in love, I was: but we talked without any guards at all. When I spoke about my future, my hopes, he listened; if I asked him his, the secretiveness came back as though I had switched off a light. As an evasion he threw himself with intense vicarious interest into my relations with Herbert Getliffe.

As it happened, Getliffe was a tempting person to gossip about. It was hard not to be captivated by him occasionally: it was even harder not to speculate about his intentions, particularly if they had any effect on one’s livelihood. I knew that, the first time he interviewed me in chambers, after I had already arranged to become his pupil. He was late for the appointment, and I waited in his room; it was a rainy summer afternoon, and looking down from the window I saw the empty gardens and the river. Getliffe hurried in, dragging his feet, his lip pushed out in an apologetic grin. Suddenly his expression changed into a fixed gaze from brown and lively eyes.

‘Don’t tell me your name,’ he said. His voice was a little strident, he was short of breath. ‘You’re Ellis–’ I corrected him. As though he had not heard my correction at all, he was saying ‘You’re Eliot.’ Soon he was telling me: ‘I make it a principle to take people like you. Who’ve started with nothing but their brains.’

He chuckled, suddenly, as though we were jointly doing someone down: ‘It keeps the others up to it.’

‘And’ – his moods were quick, he was serious and full of responsibility again – ‘we’ve got a duty towards you. One’s got to look at it like that.’

Inside a quarter of an hour he had exhorted, advised, warned, and encouraged me. He finished up: ‘As for the root of all evil – I shall have to charge you the ordinary pupil’s fees. Hundred pounds for this year. This year only. You can pay in quarters. The advantage of the instalment system is that we can reconsider it for the fourth. If you’ve earned a bit of bread and butter before then.’ He smiled, protruding his lip and saying: ‘Yes! The labourer is worthy of his hire.’

I told Charles of this conversation in my first week in London. He said: ‘His brother was a friend of mine at Cambridge. By the way, he’s singularly unlike him. I was taken to dinner with your Herbert once, last year. Of course, he was the life and soul of the party. The point is, when he was talking to you I’m sure he believed every word he said. That’s his strength. Don’t you feel that’s his strength?’

He added a few minutes later: ‘I wish I’d known you were going to him, though.’

Then he knew he had made me more anxious: for the unreliability of Getliffe’s temperament was one of those disagreeable truths which I could admit equably enough to myself, but was hurt to hear from anyone else. He said quickly: ‘I really meant you might have done better at the Chancery Bar. But it’ll make no difference. He’ll be better in some ways than a solid cautious man could possibly be. It’ll even itself out. It won’t affect you too much, you agree, don’t you?’

If I had mentioned it to Charles in the summer, he would have sent me to some other chambers, and I should have been spared a good deal. For this year, however, there were certain advantages in being with Getliffe. Quite early in the autumn, he began fetching me into his room two or three times each week. ‘How’s it going?’ he would say, and when I mentioned a case, he would expound with a cheerful, invigorating enthusiasm, more often than not getting the details a trifle wrong (that first slip with my name was typical of his compendious but fuzzy memory). Then he would produce some papers for me: ‘I’d like a note on that by the end of the week. Just to keep you from rusting.’

Often there were several days’ work in one of those notes, and it was only by not meeting Charles and sitting up late that I could deliver it in time. Getliffe would glance through the pages, take them in with his quick, sparkling eyes, and say affably: ‘You’re getting on! You’re getting on!’

The first time it happened, I was surprised to find the substance of one of those drafts of mine appearing in the course of an opinion of his own. In most places he had not even altered the words.

The weeks went by, the new year arrived: and still Charles had told me little about himself. He had said no more about his family; he had never suggested that I should visit them. He offered no explanation, not even an excuse to save my face. It seemed strange, after he had taken such subtle pains over the most trivial things. It could not be reconciled with all the kind, warm-hearted, patient friendliness I had received at his hands.

At last he asked me. We were having tea in my room on a January afternoon. He spoke in a tone different from any I had heard him use: not diffident or anxious, but cold, as though angry that I was there to receive the invitation.

‘I wonder if you would care to dine at my father’s house next week?’

I looked at him. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said: ‘It might interest you to see the inside of a Jewish family.’