The Conscience of the Rich (4 page)

‘Oh God, Mr L,’ Katherine broke out. ‘I’ve lost my grip.
Why
was the footman on all fours?’

‘
Looking for the key
, of course,’ Mr March shouted victoriously. ‘It was still lost. John discovered it late that night–’

Mr March sailed into port by describing how the documents were read and showed Philip to have assumed one erroneous datum. But, as Mr March admitted, the datum was quite irrelevant to their transaction, and it was only in method that he had scored a decisive point of judgement.

We went back to the drawing-room for coffee. Mr March sat by the fire, radiant, bursting out into another piece of total recall. Nothing prevented him – I was thinking – from saying what he felt impelled to say; the only decorum he obeyed seemed to rest in purely formal things; he was an uncontrollably natural man, and yet when the coffee was two minutes late he felt a pang, as though something improper had happened.

We had not been sitting long in the drawing-room before Mr March was arranging a time-table for the next day. He visited his chauffeur first thing each morning, with written instructions of the times he and Katherine wanted the car; he felt the next day slipping out of his control unless he could compile the list the previous night.

‘I suppose you’re really going to the dance at last?’ he said to Katherine.

‘I’m not absolutely certain,’ she said.

‘I wish you’d make up your mind one way or the other. How can I keep Taylor in a suitable frame of mind tomorrow if he doesn’t know whether he’s on duty at eight o’clock or not?’

‘Look. I can easily take her if she wants to go,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to accept responsibility for my son’s car,’ said Mr March.

‘But I’m pretty certain she’d definitely rather not,’ said Charles. ‘That’s true, Katherine, isn’t it?’

‘I shan’t get any pleasure from it myself. If I go it’s only to oblige you, Mr L,’ said Katherine.

I glanced at her. For an instant I thought she was frightened of being a failure at the dance. It did not make much sense – she had pleasant looks, she was so fresh and warm. But she was only eighteen, there were the traces of a schoolgirl left in her: I imagined she could be shy of men, or dread they would have no use for her.

Suddenly, I knew that was not the reason. This dance must have a special meaning.

In fact, as I soon gathered, it was one of the regular dances arranged for the young men and girls of Jewish society in London; a means, as Mr March accepted with his usual realism, of helping to marry them off within their proper circle.

‘I’ll only go to oblige you,’ said Katherine.

‘I don’t want you to oblige me, but I want you to go.’

‘I’ll promise to get myself there once before the end of the winter,’ said Katherine.

‘It’s no use attending as though you were paying a visit to a mausoleum,’ Mr March shouted.

‘I’m certain I can’t possibly like it,’ she said.

‘How do you know you won’t like it? Florence thought she wouldn’t like it till she tried.’

Florence was not, as I thought at the time, the other daughter – but merely a second cousin of Mr March’s.

‘I’ll try to be unprejudiced when I do go,’ she said. ‘If you don’t press me until I just want to get it over.’

‘I’m not pressing you. Except that there are certain actions I require of my daughter–’

Charles broke in: ‘That’s putting her in a false position.’ At once Katherine was left out of the quarrel. Mr March’s temper flared against his son. He said:

‘It’s a position you ought to have adopted on your own account. You’ve only been there once or twice yourself. Though you knew what I required–’

‘Don’t you see it is for exactly the same reason that I only went once myself? You’re asking her to spend her time with totally uncongenial people–’

‘What do you mean, uncongenial?’

Charles said: ‘She’ll only be miserable if you insist.’

Mr March shouted: ‘I don’t know why you’re specially competent to judge.’

‘I’m afraid I know,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to recognize it for a minute.’

Katherine was flushed and worried, as she looked from one to the other. Now that the anger was concentrated between them, with her left out, it had taken on a different tone.

Charles began to speak quietly to Mr March. I said to Katherine to take her attention away:

‘Don’t you think any mass of people sounds rather forbidding? But one can usually find a few who make it tolerable, when one actually arrives.’

She gave an uncomfortable smile. The quarrel, however, seemed to have died down. Soon Mr March said, with no sign that he had been shouting angrily a few minutes before:

‘The chief feature of these dances occurred one night when I escorted your mother. I was feeling festive, because we’d recently become engaged. It was 1898, though my sister Caroline always said we were as good as engaged after Seder night in ’96. She wasn’t at this dance, but your mother’s sister Nellie was, unfortunately as it turned out. We’d been dancing very vigorously, proper old-fashioned dancing that you’re all too degenerate to approve of. So I went outside to mop my brow. When I came back into the room your mother and her sister were sitting down on the other side. Someone stopped me and said: “Mr March, I must felicitate you on your engagement.” I didn’t like him, but I said “Thank you very much”; I thought I might as well be civil. Then he said: “Isn’t your fiancée sitting over there?” And I agreed. He went on – he was a talkative fellow – and said: “I suppose she’s the pretty one on the left.”’ Mr March simmered with laughter. ‘Of course, he’d fallen into the trap. That was her sister. No one ever thought my wife was the prettier one. But I liked her more.’

At exactly 10.40 Mr March started to his feet and said good night. ‘You’ll visit us again, I hope,’ he said, in a manner so simple and natural that it seemed more than a form. Then, with equal attention to the task in hand, he set off on a tour of inspection round the room; he pulled aside each curtain to make sure that the window behind it was latched for the night. His final words were to Charles: ‘Don’t forget to lock this door. When you decide to retire.’

When he had left, Charles explained:

‘The idea is, you imagine a burglar getting through the windows. In spite of the fact that Mr L has seen they’re locked and bolted. Then, having got through the window, the burglar discovers with amazement that the door is locked on the other side.’

Katherine smiled.

‘But he was more tolerable than I expected tonight, I must say,’ she said. ‘I thought there might be a scene. I was afraid it might be embarrassing for you,’ she said to me.

‘Yes,’ said Charles. Then he asked her: ‘You are satisfied, aren’t you? You do feel that things are coming out better?’

‘Thanks to the way you coped,’ she said.

In a few minutes she went to bed, and soon Charles and I walked out into the square. I told him how much I liked them both.

‘I’m enormously glad,’ he said. His face was lit up with a blaze of pleasure; for a second, he looked boyish and happy.

We talked about Mr March. Charles pointed back to the house: several windows were still lighted. ‘He’s waiting to hear me come in,’ he said. ‘Then he’ll trot downstairs to see that the door is properly fastened.’ Charles was speaking with fondness; but I noticed that he found it easier to talk of Mr March’s eccentric side. He was using this joke, this legend of Mr March, to distract first my eyes, and then his own.

When I mentioned Katherine again, he broke out without any reserve.

‘I’m devoted to her, of course. As it happened, we were bound to have a lot in common. It was exciting when I suddenly discovered that she was growing up.’ Then he said: ‘I couldn’t let her be sent to this dance – without trying to stop it. You could see it wasn’t just ordinary diffidence, couldn’t you?’

I said: ‘As soon as she spoke.’

‘If a man she liked wanted to take her to a dance, she might be nervous, and then I’d definitely bully her into going,’ said Charles. ‘It would do her good to be flirted with. But this is different. It means something important to her. If she goes, she’s accepting–’ He hesitated. He had suddenly begun to speak with obsessive force. He said: ‘If she goes, she’ll find it harder to keep on terms with everything she wants to be.’

Charles seemed to be afraid that, during our conversation about Katherine, he had given himself away. He did not refer to it again until, in curious circumstances, he made a confession. That happened some months later than my introduction to his family, on the night after his first case.

Meanwhile, Mr March and Katherine welcomed me at Bryanston Square, and I went there often.

On the surface, of course, we were novelties to each other – I as much to them as they to me. They had never known a poor young man. Mr March once or twice took an opportunity to put me at my ease; on one occasion, I had written to him apologizing for having caused some trouble (my rooms became uninhabitable owing to a burst gas-pipe, and I stayed a couple of nights at Bryanston Square). He replied in a letter which covered two sheets of writing paper; his handwriting was firm, his style rather like his speech, but sometimes both eloquent and stately; he said ‘…as you know, no one deplores more than I the indifference to manners and common decency displayed by the younger generation. But I am glad to make an exception of yourself, who are always the height of punctiliousness and good form…’ It was untrue, by any conceivable standard. It delighted me to read it; it gave me the special pleasure of being flattered on a vulnerable spot.

On my side, I was often fascinated by the sheer machinery of their lives. They were the first rich family I had known; in those first months, it was their wealth that took my attention more, not their Jewishness. It was the signs of wealth that I kept absorbing – yes, with a kind of romantic inflation, as though I had been one of Balzac’s young men.

I should have done the same if they had not been Jews at all; yet I had already seen the meaning which being Jews had for both Charles and Katherine. They had not spoken of it. I dared not hurt them by saying a word. I could not forget Charles’ invitation to ‘see the inside of a Jewish family’ nor Katherine’s face as they quarrelled about the dance. This silence, which got in the way of our intimacy, had the minor result of misleading me. I did not appreciate for a long time how eminent the family was. I picked up some facts, that Mr March’s brother Philip was the second baronet, that both Philip and his father had sat as Conservative members: but no one mentioned, or let me infer, that the Marches were one of the greatest of Anglo-Jewish houses.

About their luxuries, however, they were as amused as I was. They were both quick at seeing their everyday actions through fresh eyes.

Katherine said one night as she came down to dinner: ‘I thought of you in my bath, Lewis. I just remembered that I’ve never run one single bath for myself in the whole of my life.’

One afternoon at Bryanston Square, I made another discovery. Charles and I were alone in the drawing-room. There came a tap on the door, and a small elderly man entered the room, wearing a cloth cap. I thought he could scarcely be a servant: Charles took no notice, and went on talking. The man walked up to the clock over the fireplace, opened it, wound it up, and went away.

‘Whoever is that?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ said Charles, ‘that’s the clock man.’

Charles looked surprised, then began to smile as I asked more questions. The clock man had no other connection with the house; he was appointed to come in on one afternoon a week, and wind up and supervise all the clocks. He was engaged on the same terms by other houses in the square; like many of the Marches’ servants, he would be recommended from one relative to another – their butlers and chief parlourmaids usually began as junior servants in another March household. Charles claimed to have heard one of his aunts ask: ‘I wonder if you can tell me of a good reliable clock man?’

It seemed bizarre, more so than any of the open signs of wealth. As Charles said: ‘I suppose it is the sort of thing anyone would expect Mr L to do himself. Putting on his deerstalker hat for the purpose.’

But there was one sign of wealth that neither Charles nor I could face so easily.

Our year as pupils ended in September; at the end of it, Charles remained in Hart’s chambers, scarcely mentioning the fact; Getliffe let me stay on in his ‘paying a nominal rent. Just as a matter of principle’. He had not referred again to any remission of pupil’s fees; he promised to find me some work, and several times I heard the phrase ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’.

In fact, I was doing the same work that winter as when I was still a pupil. I told myself that nothing worth having could possibly come yet. Just as I had done the year before, I attended many cases, as though it were better to be in court as a spectator than not at all. Charles, just as he had done the year before, came with me to hear Getliffe in the King’s Bench Courts. One day, it was all according to the usual pattern. Getliffe for once was not late, but he was no less flurried-looking. His wig was grimy, and he pushed it askew. As usual, when he spoke he gave the impression of being both nervous and at home. He used short and breathless sentences and occasionally broke into his impudent shame-faced smile. The case was merely a matter of disentangling some intricate precedent and he was doing it clumsily and at length. Yet the judge was kind to him, most people were on his side.

When they went in to lunch, Charles and I walked in the Temple gardens, just as we had often done the year before.

‘One thing about him,’ said Charles, ‘he does enjoy what he’s doing. Don’t you agree? He thoroughly enjoys coming into court and wearing his wig. Even though he’s a bit nervous. Of course he enjoys being a bit nervous. He’s completely happy playing at being a lawyer.’

Then he smiled, and his eyes shone.

‘But still, I refuse to let him take me in altogether. It will be monstrous if he wins this case. It will be absolutely monstrous.’

Charles began to argue, at his most incisive, what Getliffe’s case should have been. He could not forget what he called the ‘muddiness’ of Getliffe’s mind: even though he felt humorously tender to him as he heard him speak, even though he could not escape the envy that a carefree spontaneous nature evokes in one more constrained.