The Conscience of the Rich

1: Confidences on a Summer Evening

It was a summer afternoon, the last day of the Bar final examinations. The doors had just swung open; I walked to my place as fast as I could without breaking into a run. For an instant I was touched again by the odour of the old Hall, blended from wooden panels, floor polish, and the after-smell of food; it was as musty as a boarding house, and yet the smell, during those days, became as powerful in making one’s heart lift up and sink as that of the sea itself.

As I stared at the question-paper, I went through an initial moment in which the words, even the rubric ‘Candidates are required to answer…’ appeared glaring but utterly unfamiliar. At the beginning of each examination I was possessed in this way: as though by a magnified version of one of those amnesias in which a single word — for example TAKE — looks as though we have never seen it before, and in which we have to reassure ourselves, staring at the word, that it occurs in the language and that we have used it, spelt exactly in that fashion, every day of our lives.

Then, all of a sudden, the strangeness vanished. I was reading, deciding, watching myself begin to write. The afternoon became a fervent, flushed, pulsing, and exuberant time. This I could do; I was immersed in a craftsman’s pleasure. In the middle of the excitement I was at home.

Towards the end of the afternoon, the sunlight fell in a swathe across the room, picking out the motes like the beam from a cinema projector. I was cramped, tired, and the sweat was running down my temples; my hand shook as I stopped writing.

In that moment, I noticed Charles March sitting a little farther up the hall, across the gangway. His fair hair, just touching the beam of sunlight, set it into a blaze. His head was half turned, and I could see the clear profile of his clever, thin, fine-drawn face. As he wrote, hunched over his desk, his mouth was working.

I turned back to my paper, for the last spurt.

I had been a little disappointed at not meeting Charles during the course of the examination. We had only talked to one another a few times, when we happened to be eating dinners at the Inn on the same night; but I thought that at first sight we had found something like kinship in each other’s company.

I knew little of the actual circumstances of his life, and the little I knew made the feeling of kinship seem distinctly out-of-place. He came from Cambridge to eat his dinner at the Inn, I from a bed-sitting room in a drab street in a provincial town. His family was very rich, I had gathered: I was spending the last pounds of a tiny legacy on this gamble at the Bar.

We had never met anywhere else but at the Inn dining table. When I last saw him, we had half arranged to go out together one night during the examination. All I had heard from him, however, was a ‘good luck’ on the first morning, as we stood watching for the doors to open.

At last the invigilator called for our papers, and I stayed in the gangway, wringing the cramp out of my fingers and waiting for Charles to come along.

‘How did you get on?’ he said.

‘It might have been worse, I suppose.’ I asked about himself as we reached the door. He answered: ‘Well, I’m afraid the man next to me is the real victim.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘He was trying to get a look at my paper most of the afternoon,’ said Charles. ‘If the poor devil managed it, I should think he’d probably fail.’

I laughed at him for touching wood. He began protesting, and then broke off: ‘Look here, would it be a bore for you if we had tea somewhere? I mean, could you possibly bear it?’

I was already used to his anxious, repetitious, emphatic politeness; when I first heard it, it sounded sarcastic, not polite.

We went to a tea-shop close by. We were both very hot, and I was giddy with fatigue and the release from strain. We drank tea, spread the examination paper on the table and compared what we had done. Charles returned to my remark about touching wood: ‘It’s rather monstrous accusing me of that. If I’d shown the slightest sign of ordinary human competence—’ Then he looked at me. ‘But I don’t know why we should talk about my performances. They’re fairly dingy and they’re not over-important. While yours must matter to you, mustn’t they? I mean, matter seriously?’

‘Yes, very much,’ I said.

‘Just how much? Can you tell me?’

In the light of his interest, which had become both kind and astringent, I was able to tell the truth: that I had spent the hundred-or-two pounds I had been left in order to read for the Bar; that I had been compelled to borrow some more, and was already in debt. There was no one, literally no one, I had to make it clear, to whom I could turn for either money or influence. So it rested upon this examination. If I did exceptionally well, and won a scholarship that would help me over the first years at the Bar, I might pull through; if not, I did not know what was to become of me.

‘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.

2: Invitation to Bryanston Square

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.’

3: Mr March with His Children

At the time, Charles was so distressed that I hurried to accept and then turn the conversation away. It was later before I could think over my surprise. For I had been surprised: although as soon as I heard him speak, I thought myself a fool for not having guessed months before.

I remembered hearing Getliffe chat about ‘the real Jewish upper deck. They’re too aristocratic for the likes of us, Eliot’ — and now I realized that he was referring to Charles. As it happened, however, I had known scarcely a single Jew up to the time I came to London. In the midland town where I was born, there had been a few shops with Jewish names over them; but I could not remember my parents and their friends even so much as mention a Jewish person. There were none living in the suburban backstreets: nor, when I got my first invitations from professional families, were there any there.

I could think of just one exception. It was a boy in my form at the grammar school. He stayed at the school only a year or two: he was not clever, and left early: but for the first term, before we were arranged in order of examination results, we shared the same desk because our names came next to each other in the list.

He was a knowing, cheerful little boy who brought large packets of curious boiled sweets to school every Monday morning and gave me a share in the midday break. In Scripture lessons he retired to the back of the class, and studied a primer on Hebrew. He assumed sometimes an air of mystery about the secrets written in the Hebrew tongue; it was only as a great treat, and under solemn promises never to divulge it, that I gained permission to borrow the primer in order to learn the alphabet.

I remembered him with affection. He was small, dark, hook-nosed, his face already set in more adult lines than most of ours in the form. It was an ugly, amiable, precocious face; and on that one acquaintance, so it seemed, I had built up in my mind a standard of Jewish looks.

When I met Charles, it never occurred to me to compare him. He was tall and fair; his face was thin, with strong cheekbones; many people thought him handsome. After one knew that he was a Jew, it became not too difficult to pick out features that might conceivably be ‘typical’. For a face so fine-drawn his nostrils spread a little more than one would expect, and his under-lip stood out more fully. But that was like water-divining, I thought, the difficulties of which were substantially reduced if one knew where the water was. After mixing with the Marches and their friends and knowing them for years, I still sometimes wondered whether I should recognize Charles as a Jew if I now saw him for the first time.

I paid my first visit to Bryanston Square on a clear cold February night. I walked the mile and a half from my lodgings: along Wigmore Street the shops were locked, their windows shining: in the side-streets, the great houses stood dark, unlived-in now. Then streets and squares, cars by the kerb, lighted windows: at last I was walking round the square, staring up at numbers, working out how many houses before the Marches’.

I arrived at the corner house; over the portico there was engraved the inscription, in large plain letters, 17 BRYANSTON SQUARE.

A footman opened the door, and the butler took my overcoat. With a twinge of self-consciousness, I thought it was probably the cheapest he had received for years. He led the way to the drawing-room, and Charles was at once introducing me to his sister Katherine, who was about four years younger than himself. As she looked at me, her eyes were as bright as his; in both of them, they were the feature one noticed first. Her expression was eager, her skin fresh. At a first sight, it looked as though Charles’ good looks had been transferred to a fuller, more placid face.

‘I’ve been trying to bully Charles into taking me out to meet you,’ she said after a few moments. ‘You were becoming rather a legend, you know.’

‘You’re underestimating your own powers,’ Charles said to her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve cross-questioned me about Lewis. You’ve done everything but track me. I never realized you had so much character.’

‘It was the same with his Cambridge friends,’ said Katherine. ‘He was just as secretive. It’s absolutely monstrous having him for a brother — if one happens to be an inquisitive person.’

She had picked up some of his tricks of speech. One could not miss the play of sympathy and affection between them. Charles was laughing, although he stood about restlessly waiting for their father to come in.

Katherine answered questions before I had asked them, as she saw my eyes looking curiously round the room. It was large and dazzlingly bright, very full of furniture, the side-tables and the far wall cluttered with photographs; opposite the window stood a full-length painting of Charles as a small boy. He was dressed for riding, and was standing against a background of the Row. The colouring was the reverse of timid — the hair bright gold, cheeks pink and white, eyes grey.

‘He was rather a beautiful little boy, wasn’t he?’ she said. ‘No one ever thought of painting me at that age. Or at any other, as far as that goes. I was a useful sensible shape from the start.’

Charles said: ‘The reason they didn’t paint you was that ‘Mr L’ — (their father’s first name was Leonard and I had already heard them call him by his nickname) — ‘decided that there wasn’t much chance of your surviving childhood anyway. And if he tempted fortune by having you painted, he was certain that you’d be absolutely condemned to death.’

I inspected the photographs on the far wall. They were mostly nineteenth-century, some going back to daguerreotype days.

‘I can’t help about those,’ said Katherine. ‘I don’t know anything about them. I’m no good at ancestor worship.’ She said it sharply, decisively.

Then she returned, with the repetitiveness that I was used to in Charles, to the reasons why she had not been painted — anxious to leave nothing to doubt, anxious not to be misunderstood.

It was now about a minute to eight, and Mr March came in. He came in very quickly, his arms swinging and his head lowered. As we shook hands, he smiled at me shyly and with warmth. He was bald, but the hair over his ears was much darker than his children’s; his features were not so clear cut as theirs. His nose was larger, spread-out, snub, with a thick black moustache under it. When he spoke, he produced gestures that were lively, active, and peculiarly clumsy. They helped make his whole manner simple and direct — to my surprise, for I had expected him to seem formidable at once. But I had only to watch his eyes, even though the skin round them was reddened and wrinkled, to see they had once looked like Charles’ and Katherine’s and were still as sharp.

He was wearing a dinner jacket, though none of the rest of us had dressed. Charles had several times told me not to. Mr March noticed my glance.

‘You mustn’t mind my appearance,’ he said. ‘I’m too old to change my ways. You’re all too bohemian for me. But when my children refuse to bring any of their friends to see their aged parent if they have to make themselves uncomfortable, I’m compelled to stretch a point. I’d rather have you not looking like a penguin than not at all.’

The butler opened the door; we followed Katherine in to dinner. After blinking under the mass of candelabras in the drawing-room, I blinked again, for the opposite reason: for we might have been going into the shadows of a billiard-hall. The entire room, bigger even than the one we had just left, was lit only at the table and by a few wall-lights. On the walls I dimly saw paintings of generations of the family; later I discovered that the earliest, a picture of a dark full-bearded man, was finished in the 1730s, just after the family settled in England.

I sat on Mr March’s left opposite Katherine, with Charles at my side; we took up only a segment of the table. A menu card lay by Mr March’s place; he read it out to us with gusto and satisfaction: ‘clear soup, fillets of sole, lamb cutlets, caramel mousse, mushrooms on toast.’

The food was very good. Mr March began talking to me about Herbert Getliffe and the Bar; he already knew something of my career.

‘My nephew Robert used to be extremely miserable when he was in your position,’ said Mr March. ‘My brother-in-law warned him he’d got to wait for his briefs, but Robert always was impatient, and I used to see him being disgorged from theatres every time I took my wife out for a spree. One night I met him on the steps of the St James’s—’

‘What’s going to theatres got to do with his being impatient, Mr L?’ Katherine was beginning to laugh.

Mr March, getting into his stride, charged into a kind of anecdote that I was not ready for. I had read descriptions of total recall: Mr March got nearer to it than anyone I had heard. Each incident that he remembered seemed as important as any other incident (this meeting with his nephew Robert was completely casual and happened over twenty years before): and he remembered them all with extravagant vividness. Time did not matter; something which happened fifty years ago suggested something which happened yesterday.

I was not ready for that kind of anecdote, but his children were. They set him after false hares, they interrupted, sometimes all three were talking at once. I found myself infected with Mr March’s excitement, even anxious in case he should not get back to his starting-point.

Listening to the three of them for the first time, I felt dazed. Mr March’s anecdotes were packed with references to his relatives and members of their large inter-married families. Occasionally these were explained, but usually taken for granted. He and his children had naturally loud voices, and in each other’s presence they became louder still. Between Mr March and Charles I could feel a current of strain; perhaps between Mr March and Katherine also, I did not know; but the relations of all three were very close.

I kept looking from one to another of the clever, energetic, mobile faces. I knew that Charles had regretted inviting me; that, as we waited for his father to come in, he wished the evening were already over; yet now he was more alive than I had ever seen him.

‘Yes, what was going to theatres to do with Robert being impatient?’ asked Charles.

‘If he hadn’t been impatient, he wouldn’t have gone to theatres,’ said Mr March. ‘You know he doesn’t go now. And if his uncle Philip hadn’t been so impatient, he wouldn’t have made such a frightful ass of himself last Tuesday. That’s my eldest brother, Philip’ — he suddenly turned to me — ‘I’ve never known him make such a frightful ass of himself since that night in 1899. The key was lost—’

‘When, Mr L? In 1899?’ asked Katherine.

‘What key?’

‘Last Tuesday, of course. The key of my confounded case. I didn’t possess a case in 1899. I used the bag that Hannah gave me. She never liked me passing it on to my then butler. So I told Philip the key was lost when I saw him in my club. They’d just made us trustees of this so-called charity, though why they want to add to my labours and give me enormous worry and shorten my life, I’ve never been able to understand.’ (At that time Mr March was nearly sixty-three. He had retired thirty years before, when the family bank was sold.) ‘Philip ought to expect it. They used to call him the longest-headed man on the Stock Exchange. Though since he levelled up on those Brazilian Railways, I have always doubted it.’

‘Didn’t you level up yourself, Mr L?’ said Katherine. ‘Wasn’t that the excuse you gave for not buying a car when they first came out?’

‘While really he’s always been terrified of them. You’ve never bought a car yet, have you?’ said Charles.

‘It depends what you mean by buying,’ Mr March said hurriedly.

‘That’s trying to hedge,’ said Charles. ‘He can’t escape, though. He’s always hired them from year to year—’ he explained to me. ‘It must have cost ten times as much, but he felt that if he never really committed himself, he might find some excuse to stop. Incidentally, Mr L, it’s exactly your idea of economy.’

‘No! No!’ Mr March was roaring with laughter, shouting, pointing his finger. ‘I refuse to accept responsibility for moving vehicles, that’s all. I also told Philip that I refused to accept responsibility if he took action before we considered the documents—’

‘The documents in the case?’

‘He stood me some tea — extremely bad teas they’ve taken to giving you in the club: they didn’t even provide my special buns that afternoon — and I said we ought to consider the documents and then call at the banks. “When are you going to meet me at these various banks?” I said. He said I was worrying unnecessarily. My married daughter said exactly the same thing before her children went down with chicken-pox. So I told Philip that if he took action without sleeping on it, I refused to be a party to any foolishness that might ensue. I splashed off negotiations.’

‘What did you do?’ said Katherine.

‘I splashed off negotiations,’ said Mr March, as though it was the obvious, indeed the only word.

‘Did Uncle Philip mind?’

‘He was enormously relieved. Wasn’t he enormously relieved?’ Charles asked.

Mr March went on: ‘Apart from his initial madheadedness, he took it very well. So I departed from the club. Owing to all these controversies, I was five minutes later than usual passing the clock at the corner; or it may have been fast, you can’t trust the authorities to keep them properly. Then I got engaged in another controversy with the newsboy under the clock. I took a paper and he insisted I’d paid, but I told him I hadn’t. I thought he was a stupid fellow. He must have mixed me up with a parson who was buying a paper at the same time. I tossed him double or quits, and I unfortunately lost. Then I arrived outside the house, and, just as I was thinking of a letter to Philip dissociating myself from his impulsive methods — I saw a light on in my dressing-room. So I ascended the stairs and found no one present in the room. John — that is my butler,’ he remarked to me — ‘came with me and I asked for an explanation. No one could offer anything satisfactory. We went into my bedroom and I asked the footman. Not that I’ve ever known him explain anything. He was under the window on all fours—’

‘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.’

4: A Sign of Wealth

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.

‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind putting up a bit of muddiness myself — if I could get a foot in first.’

Charles was intent on the pure argument; for him, usually so quick, it took moments to realize that I had spoken bitterly. We were further apart than usual; here, more than anywhere, each felt estranged from the other; as our careers came nearer, we began to know for the first time that we were being driven different ways. Then he said: ‘I suppose you feel that you’re wasting months of your life.’

‘Don’t you? Don’t you?’

‘I might waste more than months.’ He paused, and went on: ‘Don’t you think that even Getliffe sometimes wonders whether he’s been such a success after all?’

‘I’d prefer it to none at all.’

‘That’s over-simple,’ said Charles. ‘Or else I’m making excuses in advance. Do you mean that?’

‘How much are you looking forward to your first case?’ I said.

‘Not very much,’ said Charles. ‘Not in your fashion. I don’t know. I may be glad when it comes.’

Within a month of that conversation, his first case came. Something different, that is, from the guinea visits to the police courts, which we had both made: instead, a breach of contract, legally interesting although the amounts involved were small, arrived in Hart’s chambers. The plaintiff knew one of Charles’ uncles, and Hart himself; Hart, who had married Charles’ cousin, suggested that young March was the most brilliant of the family and only needed some encouragement. So the case came to Charles. There was nothing sensational about it; it was a chance for which, that winter, I would have given an ear.

Charles could see the depth, the rancour, of my envy. One of the nights we studied the papers together, he looked at me with eyes dark and hard.

‘I’m just realizing how true it is,’ he said, ‘that it’s not so easy to forgive someone, when you’re taking a monstrously unfair advantage over him.’ Trying to compensate for my envy, I spent evenings with him over the case. He was so restless, so anxious, that it was uncomfortable to be near: to begin with, I envied him even that. To have a real event to be anxious about! Then I suspected that this was not just ordinary anxiety.

He worked hard, but he was tense all the time, getting out of bed at night to make sure he had written a point down. If and when my first case came, I thought, I should do the same. But I should still be in high spirits — while one had only to listen to Charles’ voice to hear something inexplicably harsh, not only anxious but abnormally strained.

As the hearing drew nearer (it was fixed for the middle of January) he seemed to find a little relief in violent, trivial worries about the case: ‘I shall put up the dimmest opening,’ he said, ‘that’s ever been heard in a court of law. Can’t you imagine the heights of dimness that I shall manage to reach?’

Several times, as I heard him reiterate these anxieties, I thought how they would have deceived me only a short time before. Charles was the most restrained of his family; but, like Mr March and Katherine, he did not try to be stoical in little things. Many acquaintances felt that their worries (over, for instance, this opening speech, or catching a train, or whether someone had overheard an indiscreet remark) could only be indulged in by weak and unavailing people. It was tempting to regard them as part of the sapping process of luxury. It was tempting: it seemed sociologically just: but in fact, when affliction came, not petty worry, each of the three Marches was stoical in the end.

Katherine knew this, although on those nights at Bryanston Square, while Charles was waiting for his case to come on, she watched him with pain. I wondered if she understood better than I why he was so tense. Whether she understood or not, her own nerves were strung up. But she could still tease him about the symptoms of fuss; as she did so one evening, she repeated in my presence the latest story of Mr March’s fussing, which was only a few months old.

As I knew, Mr March always expressed gloomy concern if one of his children had a sore throat: he would enquire after it repeatedly, with the most lugubrious expression:

‘Wouldn’t it be better if I sent for a practitioner? Not that I pretend to have much faith in any of them. Wouldn’t it be better if I sent for one tonight?’ In the same way, he profoundly doubted anyone’s ability to get to the correct station in time to catch an appropriate train: travelling could only be achieved by a kind of battle against the railways, in which he sat like a general surrounded by maps and time-tables, drawing up days before any journey an elaborate chart of possible contingencies.

In the past summer, he had spent himself prodigiously over a journey of Katherine’s. She had never been away alone up to this time; even now, it was scarcely alone in any but Mr March’s sense of the word, as she was going on a cruise down the Adriatic, in a party organized by her young women’s club. Mr March opposed on principle; and, when she got her way, occupied a good part of a night in making certain what would happen if she missed the party at Victoria on the first morning.

Three days after the party started, Mr March received a telegram. It reached him half an hour after breakfast and read: Regret Katherine ill in — hospital Venice food poisoning suspected urgent you should join her. It was signed by the secretary of the club. Mr March said in a business-like tone to Charles: ‘Your sister’s ill. I may be away some time’, and caught the eleven o’clock boat train.

He arrived at the hospital the following midday; he interviewed the doctors, decided it was nothing grave, and then began to grumble at the heat. He was wearing his black coat and striped trousers, and he had arrived in a Venetian July.

He saw Katherine, said: ‘I refuse to believe there’s anything wrong’, and walked off to find an English doctor. He had all his life expressed distrust of ‘those foreign practitioners’. When he talked to an English one, however, he decided that he was probably incompetent and that the Italians ‘seemed level-headed fellows’. So Mr March accepted the position; he could do nothing more; he retired to his hotel and sat in his shirt sleeves looking at the Grand Canal.

In a couple of days Mr March and the Italian doctors agreed that Katherine could be safely moved to the hotel. Mr March arranged everything with competence; as soon as Katherine began to walk about, he said, with an air of conviction and scorn:

‘I knew there was never anything wrong.’

They stayed in Venice for a fortnight. From the moment of his arrival, he had behaved with equanimity. When she recovered, however, the air of sensible friendliness suddenly broke: and it broke in a characteristic way. Katherine slept in the room next to Mr March’s: like his, its windows gave on to the Canal: to Mr March’s horror, she wanted to leave them open all night. Mr March angrily protested. Katherine pointed out that no gondolier could get in without climbing from the balcony beneath: and that, in any case, her jewellery had been deposited in the manager’s safe and there was nothing valuable to steal.

Mr March stamped up and down the room. ‘My dear girl,’ he shouted, ‘it’s not your valuables I’m thinking of, it’s your virtue.’ Katherine stuck to her point. An hour later, when they were both in bed, she heard his voice come loudly through the wall:

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…’ The last words sounded, at first hearing, as though they were an invention of her own. But like most of the March stories, this was discussed in Mr March’s presence: he protested, chuckled, added to it, and it must have been substantially true. In fact, if Mr March felt like King Lear, he acted upon it, even if the occasion seemed to others inadequate.

The story must have been true, except for what they each left out. They left out what none of us would find it necessary to tell in a family story: the fact that there was deep feeling in the quarrel, though the occasion was so absurd: that Katherine, arguing with her father, felt more overawed and frightened than she could admit: that Mr March felt a moment of anxiety, such as we all know as we see someone beginning to slip from the power of our possessive love.

5: Confession

Charles’ case lasted for a day and a half. From the beginning, lawyers thought it impossible that anyone could win it: at times, particularly on the second morning, I found my judgement wavering — was he going to prove us wrong after all? His manner was restless, sometimes diffident, sometimes sharp and ruthless: I knew — it was not an unqualified pleasure for me to know — that I did not often hear a case argued with such drive and clarity.

Mr March sat through every word. As he watched his son, his face lost its expression of lively, fluid interest, and became tightened into one that was nervous, preoccupied, and rigid. He took me out to lunch on the first day; his mood was quieter than usual, and he was glad to have someone to talk to.

‘My daughter Katherine has mysteriously refused to put in an appearance,’ he said. ‘She did not account for her actions, but the reason is, of course, that she couldn’t bear to watch my son making a frightful ass of himself in public. I must say that I can sympathize with her attitude. When he contrived to get himself into the team at school, I used to feel that propriety demanded that I should be represented in person: but invariably I wished that I could take a long walk behind the pavilion when he came out to bat.’

Mr March went on: ‘I also considered today that propriety demanded that I should be present in person. Even though it might entail seeing my son make a frightful ass of himself upon an important occasion. So far as I can gather with my ignorance of your profession, however, he appears to have avoided disaster so far. Hannah might not think so, but I fail to see why she is specially competent to judge.’

I told him how well Charles had done; Mr March gave a delighted and curiously humble smile.

‘I’m extremely glad to have your opinion,’ he said. ‘This is the first time that I’ve been able to consider the prospect of any of my family emerging into the public eye.’ He added, in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘I could never have cut anything of a dash myself. My son may conceivably find it easier.’

We walked back to the court, Mr March still nervous and proud. For the first time I had seen how much he was living again in his son.

In the last hours of the case, Charles’ cross-examination of an expert witness secured most attention. Several people later commented on how formidable a cross-examiner he would become. Actually, his own strain gave him an added edge; but still, he enjoyed those minutes. He loved argument: he was sometimes ashamed of the harshness that leapt to his tongue, but when he let himself go, argument made him fierce, cheerful, quite spontaneous and self-forgetful. The court had just admired him in one of those moods.

In the end, Charles lost the case, but the judge paid a compliment to ‘the able manner, if I may say so, in which the case has been handled by the plaintiff’s counsel.’

As we left the court, men collected round Charles, congratulating him. I joined them and did the same, before I went back to chambers.

‘I want to see you rather specially. I’ll come round tomorrow night,’ said Charles. ‘Can you manage to stay in?’

On my way to the Inn, I wondered what he was coming for. He had looked flushed and smiling: perhaps his success — my envy kept gnawing, as sharp, as dominating as neuralgia — had settled him at last. I walked along the back streets down from the Strand; it was a grey afternoon, and a mizzle of rain was greasing the pavement. I thought about Charles’ future compared with mine. In natural gifts there was not much in it. He was at least as clever, and had a better legal mind; perhaps I was the more speculative. In strength of character we were about the same. In everything but natural gifts, he had so much start that I was left at the post.

I had one advantage, though. Neither of us was the kind of man whom his career would completely satisfy. Charles had read for the Bar because he could not find a vocation; I had always known that, in the very long run, I wanted other things. The difference was, I had to behave as though the doubt did not exist. To earn a living, I had to work as though I was single-minded. Until I made some money and some sort of name, I could not even let myself look round. Charles often envied that simplification, that compulsory simplification, which being poor imposed upon my life.

Nevertheless, anyone in his senses would put his money on Charles, I told myself that afternoon. As Herbert Getliffe remarked when I arrived and told him of the result: ‘Mark my words, Eliot, that young friend of ours will go a long way.’ He went on: ‘He was lucky to get the job, of course. The boys on the Jewish upper deck are doing a bit of pulling together. Don’t you wish you were in that racket, Eliot?’

He looked harassed, responsible, sincere.

‘I must see if I can find you a snippet for yourself one of these days. The trouble is, one owes a duty to one’s clients. One can’t forget that, much as one would like to—’

The next night, I waited in my room for Charles. It was a room which bore only a remote resemblance to Mr March’s drawing-room. The satin was wearing through on the two arm-chairs; the room was unheated all day, and even by the fire at night it struck empty and chill, with the vestige of a smell of hair-lotion drifting up from the barber’s shop down below. Charles was late: at last I heard his car draw up below, and his footsteps on the stairs. As soon as he entered, I was struck by the expression on his face. The strain had left him. He apologized for keeping me; I knew that he was tired, relaxed, and content.

He sat in the other chair, at the opposite side of the fireplace. Nothing had been said except for his apologies. He stretched himself in the chair, and smiled. He said: ‘Lewis, I shan’t go on with the Bar.’

I exclaimed. After a moment, I said: ‘You’ve not settled anything, have you?’

‘What do you think?’ He was still smiling.

‘You know you’d do well at it,’ I began. ‘Better than any of us—’

‘I’m sure that’s nonsense,’ he said. ‘But in any case, it isn’t the point. You know it isn’t the point, don’t you?’

He had not come for advice. His mind was made up. There was no anxiety or hesitation left in his manner. He was speaking more calmly, with more strength and authority, than I had ever heard him speak.

‘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.

6: Full Dinner Party

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.’

The dining-room was no more clearly lit than usual when we went in; the table had been lengthened to contain the party. Mr March placed Philip on his left hand, and Philip’s wife on his right: then the brothers and sisters in order of seniority: Charles at the far end of the table, and the younger people near him. I sat a place or two from Charles between Florence Simon and one of the Herbert March girls.

Voices rose and blared as, looking down the table, I saw faces coming out of the shadows: I felt a glow because these Friday nights had gone on for so long. It was the warm romantic glow, the feeling of past time: the glow which made one of those dead and gone Friday nights become more enchanted in our minds than it ever was to sit through. I felt exactly as I sometimes did at dinner at the Inn, or when I was Francis’ guest at his High Table. The chain of lives — odd glimmers ran through my head, the fragments of information which had come down about the first English Marches sitting round their dinner-table in the City, just over their bank. The two original March families dined together on the Friday in the week they arrived in London from Deventer.

How they had first got established in Holland, where they had come from before that, there was no record nor any tradition — not even of how they derived their name. In Spain March could have been a Jewish name, but there was no evidence that these Marches ever lived there. The first mention of them in the archives was mid-seventeenth-century: they were already in Holland, already one of the leading families of the Ashkenazim (the Northern group of Jews, as opposed to the Sephardim who lived in Spain and round the Mediterranean coasts).

They were well-off when they left Deventer. During the last half of the eighteenth century, Friday night by Friday night, these parties went on, families walking to each other’s houses across the narrow City streets; their friends and relatives, the family of Levi Barend Cohen, the Rothschilds, the Montefiores, lived close by.

The nineteenth century came in; all those families, like those of the Gentile bankers, moved westward; and the Marches’ dinners took place now round Holborn. It was already the fourth generation since Deventer; the children were no longer given Jewish first names. A honeymoon couple travelled in post-chaises along the French roads as soon as the war was over, and Charlotte March wrote in 1816: ‘it must be admitted that in the arts of the toilette and the cuisine France excels our country: but we can hearten ourselves as English people that in everything essential we are infinitely superior to a country which shows so many profligacies that it is charitable to attribute them to their infamous revolution.’ This though they stayed with their Rothschild uncle in Paris; that pair thought of themselves as English, differing as little from their acquaintances as the Roman Catholic families who, when Charlotte wrote, were still hoping to be emancipated.

Victoria’s reign began. Round the dinner-table, the Marches were sometimes indignant at Jewish disabilities; David Salomons was not allowed to take his seat in Parliament. There was also talk, even in the forties, of liberalizing themselves; one March became a Christian. Apart from him, no March had married ‘out of the faith’: nor indeed out of their own circle of Anglo-Jewish families. That was still true down to the people round this table; except for one defection, by a woman cousin of Mr March’s, thirty years before.

The March bank flourished; many of the families moved to the neighbourhood of Bryanston Square; by the seventies, one of Mr March’s uncles was holding Friday dinners at No. 17. The universities and Parliament became open, and Mr March’s father went into the House. England was the least anti-Semitic of countries; when the news of the pogroms arrived from Russia in 1880, the Lord Mayor opened a fund for Jewish relief. Half the University of Oxford signed a protest. The outrages seemed an anachronistic horror to decent prosperous Englishmen. The Marches sent thousands of pounds to the Lord Mayor’s fund. Yet that news was only a quiver, a remote quiver, in the distant world.

By then the Marches had reached their full prosperity; on Friday nights cabs made their way under the gaslight to the great town houses. The Marches were secure, they were part of the country, they lived almost exactly the lives of other wealthy men.

The century passed out: its last twenty years, and the next fourteen, were the best time for wealthy men to be alive. The Marches developed as prodigally as the other rich.

Those were the heroic days of Friday nights. A whole set of stories collected round them, most of which originated when Mr March was a young man. Of Uncle Henry March, who owned race-horses and was a friend of the Prince of Wales; how he regretted all his life his slowness in repartee, and after each Friday night used to wake his wife in bed so that she should jot down answers which had just occurred to him. Of his brother Justin, who, to celebrate a Harrow victory, rode to his house on one of the horses that drew the heavy roller at Lord’s; and who, when only nine people attended one of his Friday nights, took hold of the tablecloth and pulled the whole dinner service to the ground. Of their cousin, Alfred March Hart, the balletomane who helped sponsor Diaghilev’s first season in London: who as an old man, hearing someone at a Friday night during the war hope for a Lansdowne peace, rose to his feet and began: ‘I am a very old man: and I hope the war will continue for many years after my death.’

They were the sort of stories that one finds in any family that has been prosperous for two hundred years. For me they evoked the imaginary land which exists just before one’s childhood. Often as I heard them I felt something like homesick — homesick for a time before I was born, for a society which would have thought my father’s home about as primitive as a Trobriand Islander’s.

The dinner began. At the head of the table, Philip and Mr March were talking about expectations for the Budget. Mr March suggested that supertax would be applied at a lower limit.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Philip. ‘That’s on a par with your idea for the new trust, Leonard.’

Mr March chuckled.

‘I should like to remind you that your last idea didn’t bring in sufficient for your requirements. Also that you made an exhibition of yourself over that same trust. That was the time your husband wrote a letter so precipitately—’ He turned to his sister-in-law and began to tell the story which I heard on my first visit to Bryanston Square.

‘It’s fantastic to imagine Winston doing anything of the kind,’ Philip interrupted him. ‘After what he said to the unfortunate George. I wouldn’t believe it if George weren’t much too incompetent to invent the story.’

The table quietened down. Philip gave the actual words. It was the first time I had heard behind-the-scenes gossip at that level: Philip endowed it with a special authority.

The elder Marches listened with satisfaction as Philip settled the question of supertax. Most of them were not only academically interested; there was a great deal of wealth in the room. Exactly how much, I should have liked very much to know, but about their fortunes they were more reticent than about anything else. None of the younger generation, at our end of the table, could do more than guess. Apparently no individual March had ever been enormously rich. There had probably never been a million pounds at any one man’s disposal. So far as one could judge from wills, settlements, and their style of life, most of the fortunes at this dinner-table would be between £100,000 and £500,000.

Philip was talking about the next election: ‘We’ve left it too late. We’re a set of bunglers. Our fellows had better stick it out until they’re bound to go.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ said Caroline.

‘We shall get the sack,’ said Philip.

‘Does that mean a Socialist Government?’ asked Florence Simon of Charles.

‘What else do you think it can mean?’ Mr March exclaimed down the table. ‘Now that your Aunt Winifred’s wretched party has come to the end that they’ve always richly deserved.’

He was chuckling at Winifred, Herbert March’s wife, who was the only Liberal of the older generation. The Marches had been Conservatives for a hundred years; when they stood for Parliament, it was as supporters of Salisbury, Balfour, Bonar Law; their political attitudes were those of other rich men.

At our end of the table, opinion moved a good way to the left. Herbert March’s daughter Margaret, who had not long since graduated at Oxford, was working as secretary to a Labour member. She was the most practical of them, the only professional: Charles took her side in argument, was more radical than she was, and Katherine followed suit. Most of the others had undertaken to vote against Sir Philip’s party. Of course, many other Marches had passed through a liberal phase in their youth — but to them that night, to me watching them, this seemed something harder, more likely to last.

We had finished the pheasant. Philip and Mr March put politics aside, and began talking about one of their nieces by marriage, who was reported to be living apart from her husband. She had always possessed a reputation for good looks: ‘the best-looking girl in the family, Herbert said, though I never knew why he was specially competent to judge,’ said Mr March. She had stayed unmarried until she was over thirty.

She was said to have had a good many offers, ‘but no one ever established where they came from,’ said Mr March. ‘The only reason I believed in them was that Hannah didn’t.’ And then, to everyone’s surprise, she had married someone quite poor, unattractive and undistinguished. ‘She married him,’ Philip announced, ‘because he was the only man who didn’t look when she was getting over a stile.’ His grin was caustic; but his dignity had broken for a moment, and there was a randy glitter in his eyes.

They were arguing about what had gone wrong with the marriage, when their sister Caroline, who was deaf, suddenly caught a word and said: ‘Were you talking about Charles?’ Mr March shook his head, but she went on: ‘I hope he realizes he’s making an ass of himself. Albert Hart won’t hear of his giving up the Bar.’

‘It’s all unsettled, there’s nothing whatever to report,’ said Mr March quickly.

Mr March had been compelled to speak loudly, even for a March, to make her understand. His voice silenced everyone else, and the entire table heard Caroline’s next question.

‘Why is it unsettled? Why has he taken to bees in his bonnet just when he might be becoming some use in the world?’

‘The whole matter’s been exaggerated,’ said Mr March. ‘Albert always was given to premature discussion—’

‘What’s this? What’s this?’ said Philip.

‘I mentioned it to you. She’s not made a discovery. I mentioned that my son Charles was going through a period of not being entirely satisfied with his progress at the Bar. Nothing has been concealed.’

Katherine was looking at Charles with a frown of distress. ‘I expect he’s got over it now. You’re all serene, aren’t you, Charles?’ Philip asked down the table: his tone was dry but friendly.

‘I’m quite happy, Uncle Philip.’

‘You’re getting down to it properly now, aren’t you?’

‘The whole matter’s been grossly exaggerated,’ Mr March broke in, rapidly, as though signalling to Charles.

‘I expect I can take it that your father’s right,’ said Philip.

There was a pause.

‘I’m sorry. I should like to agree. But you’d find out sooner or later. It’s no use my pretending that I shall work at the Bar.’

‘What’s behind all this? They tell me you’ve made a good start. What’s the matter with you?’

Charles hesitated again.

‘You’ve got one nephew at the Bar, Uncle Philip.’ Charles looked at Robert. ‘Do you want all your nephews there too? Cutting each other’s throats—’

He seemed to be passing it off casually, his tone was light; but Caroline, who was watching his face without hearing the words, broke out: ‘I didn’t mean to turn you into a board meeting. This comes of being so abominably deaf. Leonard, do you remember the day when Hannah thought I was deafer than I am?’

We went back to our pudding. Katherine had flushed: Charles smiled at her, but did not speak. He stopped the footman from filling his glass again. Most of us, after the questions ceased, had been glad of another drink, including Francis, who had been putting down his wine unobtrusively but steadily since dinner began.

The table became noisier than at any time that evening; the interruption seemed over; Charles’ neighbours were laughing as he talked.

Florence Simon plucked at my sleeve. She was a woman of thirty, with abstracted brown eyes and a long sharp nose; all through dinner I had got nowhere with her; whatever I said, she had been vague and shy. Now her eyes were bright, she had thought of something to say.

‘I wish you’d been at the dinner last Friday. It was much more interesting then.’

‘Was it?’ I said.

‘Oh, we had some really good general conversation,’ said Florence Simon. She relapsed into silence, giving me a kind, judicious, and contented smile.

7: Two Kinds of Anger

By half past eleven Katherine could speak to Charles at last. She had just said some goodbyes, and only Francis and I were left with them in the drawing-room.

‘It was atrociously bad luck,’ she burst out.

‘I was glad it didn’t go on any longer,’ said Charles.

‘It must have been intolerable,’ she cried.

‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘I was just coming to the state when I could hear my own voice getting rougher.’

‘The family have never heard anyone put Uncle Philip off before.’

‘I thought he was perfectly good-tempered,’ Charles replied. He was being matter-of-fact in the face of the excitement. ‘He’s merely used to being told what he wants to know.’

‘He’s still talking to Mr L in his study. There are several of them still there, you know,’ she went on.

‘Didn’t you expect that?’ Charles smiled at her.

‘It’s absolutely maddening,’ she broke out again, ‘this fluke happening just when Mr L was ready to accept it.’

Charles was silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘I’m not certain that he was.’

‘You told me so,’ said Katherine. ‘But still — you’re going to have a foul time. I wish to God I could help.’

She went on: ‘He thinks the world of Uncle Philip, of course. Did you notice that he pretended to have told him? He’d obviously just muttered “my son Charles is mumpish” and was hoping that nobody would notice that you never appeared in court—’

‘Is there anything I can do?’ said Francis. His voice was a little thick. In his embarrassment at dinner, he had been drinking more than the rest of us; now, when he wanted to be useful and protective, he looked as though the light was dazzling him.

Charles shook his head and said no.

‘You’re sure?’ said Francis, trying to speak with his usual crispness. Again Charles said no.

‘In that case,’ said Francis, ‘it might be wiser if the rest of us left you to it.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Charles. ‘I’d rather Mr L found you all here.’

For a second it sounded as if he were trying to avoid a scene. Listening to his tone, I suddenly felt that that was the opposite of the truth.

He went on speaking to Francis. Katherine smiled at them anxiously, then turned to me.

‘By the way, according to your theory, the mass of people at dinner must have sounded very forbidding,’ she said. ‘Did you find a few who made it tolerable? When you actually arrived?’

The question was incomprehensible, and yet she was clearly expecting me to understand. ‘Your theory’: I could not imagine what she meant.

‘Don’t you remember,’ she said, ‘saying that to me the first time we met? When I was being shunted off to the Jewish dance. I won’t swear to the actual words, but I’m pretty certain they’re nearly right. I thought over them a good many times afterwards, you see. I wondered whether you meant to take me down a peg or two for being too superior.’

It was the sort of attentive memory, the sort of extravagant thin-skinnedness, that I should have become accustomed to; but a new example still surprised me just as much.

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Katherine, ‘I decided that you probably didn’t mean that.’

Then Mr March entered. He went straight to Charles, paying no attention to the rest of us: he stood in front of Charles’ chair.

‘Now you see what you’re responsible for,’ he said. Charles got up.

‘You know how sorry I am that you’re involved, Mr L,’ Charles said.

‘I haven’t got time to speculate whether you’re sorry or not. I’ve just been listening to my brothers telling me that you’re making a fool of yourself. As though I wasn’t perfectly aware of it already. I expressed exactly the same point of view myself but unfortunately I haven’t succeeded in making much impression on you.’

‘No one could have done more than you did.’

‘A great many people could have done enormously more. Do you think my father listened to Herbert when he got up to his monkey tricks and wanted to study music? An astonishingly bad musician he would have made if you can judge by his singing in the drawing-room when we were children. Hannah said that he was only asked to sing because he was the youngest child. Anyone else would have done enormously more. In any case, I never gave my permission as you appear to have assumed. You may have thought the matter was closed, but that doesn’t affect the issue.’

‘It’s no good reopening it, Mr L. I’m sorry.’

‘Certainly it’s some good reopening it. After tonight, I haven’t any option.’

Charles suddenly broke out: ‘You admit that tonight is making the difference?’

‘I never allowed you to think that the matter was closed. But in addition to that, I don’t propose to ignore—’

‘The position is this: when we were left to ourselves, you disapproved of what I wanted and you brought up every fair argument there was. If it had been possible, you know that I should have given way. Now other people are taking a hand. I know what they mean to you, but I don’t recognize their claim to interfere. Do you think I can possibly do for them what I wouldn’t do for you alone?’

‘You talk about them as if they were strangers. They’re treated better by an outsider who’s just married into us, like that abominable woman who married your cousin Alfred. They’re your family—’

‘They’ve no right to affect my life.’

‘I won’t have the family dismissed as strangers.’

‘I should feel more justified in going against your wishes — now you’ve been influenced by them,’ said Charles, ‘than when you were speaking for yourself.’ They were standing close together. There came a cough, and to my astonishment Francis began to speak.

‘Will you forgive me for saying something, Mr March?’ His face was pallid under the sunburn; there was a film of sweat on his forehead. But he managed to make himself speak soberly: the words came out strained, uncomfortable, but positive.

Mr March, who had been totally indifferent to his presence or mine, did not notice anything unusual. With a mixture of irritableness and courtesy, Mr March said: ‘My dear fellow, I’m always glad to hear your observations.’

‘I assure you,’ said Francis, uttering with care, ‘that Charles would have gone further to meet your wishes than for any other reason. I completely agree with you that he’s wrong to give up the Bar. I think it’s sheer nonsense. I’ve told him so. I’ve argued with him since I first heard about it. But I haven’t got him to change his mind. The only argument which would make him think twice was about the effect on yourself.’

Mr March regarded him with an expression that dubiously lightened; the frown of anger had become puzzled, and Mr March said, his voice more subdued than since he entered the room: ‘That was civil of him, anyway.’

He went on: ‘I don’t know what’s happening to the family. My generation weren’t a patch on my father’s. And as for yours, there’s not one of you who’ll get a couple of inches in the obituary column. My Uncle Henry said that just before he died in ’27, and all I could reply was “After all, you can say this for them. They don’t drink, and they don’t womanize.”’

Mr March spoke straight to Charles:

‘You might be the only chance of rescuing them from mediocrity. There’s always been a consensus of opinion that you wouldn’t disgrace yourself at the Bar. Ever since your preparatory schoolmaster said you had a legal head: though he was wrong in his prognostications about all your cousins. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve the most unsatisfactory children in the whole family. First your sister made her regrettable marriage. Of her there’s nothing good to report. Then you choose to behave in this fashion. And neither you nor your sister Katherine have ever made any attempt to fit into the life of the people round you. You’ve always been utterly unsociable. You’ve never taken the part everyone wanted you to take. You’ve not had the slightest consideration for what the family thinks of me. You wouldn’t cross the road to keep me in good repute. I’ve been more criticized about my children than anyone in the family since 1902, the time Justin’s daughter married out of the faith. Justin had a worse time than anyone. He couldn’t bear to inspect the wedding presents. It was always rumoured that he sent some secretly himself to cover up a few of the gaps. Since Justin, no one has been disapproved of as I have.’

Mr March sat down, in an armchair close to one of the side tables. For a second, I thought the quarrel was over. Then Charles said: ‘I wish it weren’t so, for your sake.’

Charles had spoken simply and with feeling: in reply, Mr March flushed to a depth of anger he had not reached that night. He clutched at the arm of his chair as he leant forward; in doing so, he swept off an ashtray from the little table. The rug was shot with cigarette-stubs and match-ends. Charles bent to clear them.

‘Don’t pick them up,’ Mr March shouted. Charles replaced the ashtray, and put one or two stubs in it.

‘Don’t pick them up, I tell you,’ Mr March cried with such an increase of rage that Charles hesitated.

‘I refuse to have you perform duties for my sake. I refuse to listen to you expressing polite regrets for my sake. You appear to consider yourself completely separate from me in all respects. I am not prepared to tolerate that attitude.’

‘What do you mean?’ Charles’ voice had become angry and hard.

‘I am not prepared to tolerate your attitude that you can dissociate yourself from me in all your concerns. Even if I survive criticism from the family on your account, that isn’t to admit that you’ve separated yourself from me.’

‘I come to you for advice,’ said Charles.

‘Advice! You can go to the family lawyer for advice. Though I never knew why we’ve stood a fellow so long-winded as Morris for so long,’ cried Mr March. ‘I’m not prepared to be treated as a minor variety of family lawyer by my son. I shall have to consider taking actions that will make that clear.’

Charles broke out: ‘Do you imagine for a moment that you can coerce me back to the law?’

Mr March said: ‘I do not propose to let you abandon yourself to your own devices.’

Everyone was surprised by the calm, ambiguous answer and by Mr March’s expression. As Charles’ face darkened, Mr March looked almost placid. He seemed something like triumphant, from the instant he evoked an outburst as angry as his own. He went on quietly:

‘I want something for you. I wish I could know that you’ll get something that I’ve always wanted for you.’ He checked himself. Abruptly he broke off; be looked round at us as though there had been no disagreement whatever, and began an anecdote about a Friday night years before.