The Conscience of the Rich

8: The Cost of Help

For some time after the quarrel I did not get a clear account of Mr March’s behaviour. According to Katherine, he was so depressed that he stopped grumbling; he listened to criticisms from his brothers and sisters, but even these he did not pass on. Weeks went by before he began to greet Charles at meals with: ‘If you’re determined to persist in your misguided notions, what alternative proposal have you to offer?’ One afternoon, when I was in the drawing-room, Mr March burst in after his daily visit to the club and cried: ‘I’m being persecuted on account of my son’s fandango.’ That was all I heard directly. When I dined with them, there were times when he seemed melancholy, but his level of spirits was so high that I could not be sure. One day Charles mentioned to me that he thought Mr March had begun to worry about Katherine. I fancied that I could recall the signs.

As for Charles himself, none of his family had any idea what he was intending, or whether he was intending anything at all. He put on a front of cheerfulness and good temper in his father’s presence. His days had become as lazy as Katherine’s. He stayed in bed till midday, talked to her most afternoons, went dancing at night. Many of his acquaintances thought, just as he had predicted, that he was settling down to the life of a rich and idle young man.

They should have watched his manner as he set me going on my career.

By the early summer I still had had nothing like a serious case, and I was getting worn down with anxiety. Then Charles took charge of my affairs. He handled them with astuteness and nerve. He risked snubs, which he could not have done on his own behalf, and got me invited to the famous June party at the Holfords’. At the same time he approached Albert Hart and through him met the solicitors who sent Hart the majority of his work. One of them was glad to oblige Philip March’s nephew, and said he would like to meet me; another, one of the best-known Jewish solicitors in London, promised to be present at the Holfords’ party. There were other skeins, concealed from me, in Charles’ plans. They took up his entire attention. As he devoted himself to them, Charles was continuously angry with me.

A few minutes before the Holfords’ party, where he planned for me to make a good impression, there was an edge to his voice. I was sitting in his bedroom at Bryanston Square while he knotted his white tie in front of the mirror. I mentioned a story of Charles’ grandfather that Mr March had just told me — ‘he must have been a very able man,’ I said.

‘Obviously he must have been,’ said Charles. He was still looking into the mirror, smoothing down his thick, fair, wiry hair. ‘But he didn’t do so much after all. He was a rather successful banker. And acquired the position that a rather successful banker could in that period, if he happened to be a competent man. Don’t you agree?’

I was referring to Mr March’s account, but Charles interrupted: ‘Oh, I know he’d got some human qualities. The point is, he didn’t do so much. Look, don’t you admit those jobs he spent his life on are really pretty frivolous? I mean, the traditional jobs of my sort of people. The Stock Exchange and banking and amateur politics when you’ve made enough money. Can you imagine taking them up if you had a free choice?’

‘No,’ I said.

Charles turned round.

‘And if you had a free choice, can you imagine taking up the profession you’re anxious to be successful at?’

I did not answer.

‘You can’t imagine it. Don’t you admit that you can’t?’ Charles said, with an angry, contemptuous, sadic smile.

‘Not if I’d been given a completely free choice, perhaps.’

‘Of course you can’t. You don’t want just money. You’ll realize that if you make some. You don’t want the sort of meaningless status that appeals to Herbert Getliffe. You’ll realize that if you get it. Granted that you want to satisfy yourself instead, it’s not a job a reasonable man would choose. Don’t you agree?’

In my suspense that night, those ‘ifs’ were cruel: we each knew it. I was both hurt and angry. I could have told him that he was speaking out of bitter discontent. Did I admit to myself what kind of discontent it was? He was angry that I had direct ambitions and might satisfy them. I ought also to have known that he wanted to lead a useful life. He could not confide it or get rid of it, but he had a longing for the good. We faced each other, on the edge of quarrelling. He sounded arrogant, impatient, cruel; he was angry with me because we were different.

As he drove me to Belgrave Square through the June dusk, Charles suddenly turned as anxious as I was myself. He wanted me to be at ease; he wanted me to forget the doubts that he had raised by his own words five minutes before; he kept reiterating facts about the Holfords and their guests, and conversational gambits I could use with Albert Hart.

When we arrived in the crowded drawing-room, Charles took me to Hart’s side as soon as my introduction to Lady Holford was over. He reminded Hart about me. He set us talking. Hart was an uneasy nervous man who broke into flashes of speech: he liked Charles, it was clear, and even more he liked having someone he knew at this party, so unfluctuating in its noise-level, so ornate. In a few minutes, we moved out through the great French windows, down the steps, into the sunken garden. A waiter brought us three balloon glasses and put into each a couple of inches of brandy.

‘His lordship’s compliments,’ the waiter said to Charles, ‘and he wishes to say that this is not Napoleon brandy. But it is reasonably old.’

As soon as the waiter turned to ascend the steps, Charles looked at Albert Hart and winked. Charles’ face became gay, the more as he saw Hart and me beginning to make contact. Soon Charles left us to ‘do his duty’ in the house, and Hart and I enjoyed comparing the display round us to the subdued opulence of a March Friday night. He was supple, gossipy, devoted to his work and still, at the age of fifty or more, overawed when he went into society. I felt his heart warm to me when I told him that this was the first time I had set foot in a London garden. He was shrewd, he was trying to find out whether there was anything in me: he also had a taste for sly jokes at the Holfords’ expense, he was glad to have someone there to listen.

The garden was filling up. Hart was joined by his friend the solicitor, who at once asked me some leading questions about Herbert Getliffe. I had to try to be both forthcoming and discreet; but Hart was already friendly, and I thought the other man was ready to approve of me. The conversation returned to the Holfords: I began to feel happy as I watched the people round us, the lights at the bottom of the garden, the profound blue of the London evening sky.

Two women, mother and daughter, acquaintances of Hart and the Marches, joined us for a time. The girl was to be presented at Court the next month and the mention of royalty stimulated Albert Hart. He remembered a story of Holford, who was said, in the first hey-day of his success, to have let drop at one of his parties: ‘I suppose my daughter may as well be presented this year. It must be a bore for the monarchs, though, to see faces they know so well.’

That must have happened a few years before the Holfords’ title finally submerged their name. They first appeared in England in 1860, and they were then called Samuel; they hyphenated themselves to Samuel-Wigmore within ten years, and had dropped the Samuel by the end of the century. They had made a fortune out of cigarettes, and the man in whose garden we were standing could have bought up the entire March family. Their entertainments had been flamboyant thirty years before, and had grown steadily grander; although they boasted of their acquaintance with royalty, they genuinely had royal acquaintances to boast of. This ‘little evening party in the garden’ (in the largest garden within a mile of Hyde Park Corner) took place each year in June, just as a sign, so Albert Hart said, that they might do some less simple entertaining later in the year.

Though they had disguised their name and though nine out of ten of their guests were Gentiles, they had remained faithful Jews. And, though their success had been on a different scale, they still looked up to the Marches as one of the senior Jewish families in England, while they were newcomers. Invitations to their parties went to the Marches as a matter of right, but the Marches rarely attended. Charles would not have thought of coming that night, but for me: and yet, when he accepted the invitation and asked if he might bring a friend, the Holfords chose to forget his family’s stiffness. They seemed to feel that Jewish society was still hierarchical, that rank still meant something. It was not by accident that Holford’s message about the brandy had been sent to Charles.

It was curious to see two different social codes collide, I thought, taking my last sip of old, but not Napoleon, brandy. I felt satisfied with the evening. I felt so satisfied that when I caught sight of Charles again I did not care how much deference the Holfords gave him. He was standing at the top of the steps above the garden. A dark-haired girl was looking up at him. The light from an open window picked out the glass in his hand, the gardenia in his buttonhole, and threw his features into relief.

Then he came down the steps, and found our group. His eyes met mine, searching for how things had gone. It was not hard for him to see that I was pleased.

A moment afterwards, the lights round the garden suddenly went out. In the warm darkness we were left mystified; people asked each other what was happening. What was happening was soon known, as three gigantic Catherine wheels spurted out of the distance. Lord Holford was producing a firework display, extravagant, varied and, as we came to realize, inordinately long.

A case came to me not long after that party: not from the man I talked to there, but from another solicitor who sent a considerable amount of work to Hart and whom Charles had arranged for me to meet.

It was not such an important case as Charles’, but far better than anything I could reasonably expect. I had to prosecute in a libel action. It was not difficult, the case was fairly self-evident; but I had not much time, as someone else had thrown up the brief through illness, and with a case so good it would be disastrous not to win.

In fact, I did win, though I stumbled in the last stages. Charles had helped me prepare, and was present all through the hearing. I saw his face, clouded and frowning, as, with the case nearly won, I went off on a side-line that seemed tempting. A witness was obstinate, I knew that I might have done the case harm; but I was able to recover and make some pretence of passing it off.

When I got the verdict, I joined Charles. He congratulated me, and then, his eyes bright, said: ‘I’m glad. But what possessed you to draw that absurd red herring?’

I defended myself. I said it had not been as bad as that.

‘Oh, you did very well. Henriques [the solicitor] is satisfied with you; you’re a good investment.’

His glance kept its glint. ‘But still, you did lose sight of the point for five minutes, didn’t you? It was a classical example of using two arguments where one would do, don’t you agree?’

I felt let down. All in all I had done well: I wanted praise, not his kind of candour. He was fond of telling the truth, I thought with no detachment at all, especially when it was unpleasant.

Herbert Getliffe did just the opposite. He was fond of rejoicing with him who rejoices. He behaved as though he had won the case, instead of me, and immediately set about improvising a celebratory supper (‘each man to pay for himself and partner. I always believe in Dutch treat,’ he told me, with energy and sincerity). Over the telephone, at four hours’ notice, he invited guests, most of whom were only acquaintances of mine. Charles could not come, and Getliffe whistled and clucked his tongue in disapprobation. ‘He ought to have put everything else off, on a night like this! But you’ll find, Eliot, that some people take one view of the responsibilities of friendship, and some take another.’ He added, in his most reflective, earnest, and affectionate tone: ‘Of course some chaps in the position of young March would have done something for you in the way of introductions — instead of letting you sink or swim. I don’t believe in flattering myself, Eliot, but I must say it was a providential thing that you came to my chambers, so that you had one well-wisher at any rate to look after you a bit—’

With genuine feeling he developed the theme. He was so sincere, so full of emotion, that he found it impossible to remember that he had done nothing for me whatsoever; listening, I found it nearly as impossible myself.

At the meal, I began by being jubilant and boastful, trying to impress my neighbour, a cool and handsome girl. Getting nowhere, I went on boasting, still exalted: yet I felt this party was becoming a joke against me, and as we stood about when we had finished eating I was smiling to myself.

It was then that I caught sight of a young woman watching me: she too was smiling, but with what looked like sympathy. All I knew about her was that her name was Ann Simon, and I had met her for the first time that night. I went across to her.

‘You ought to be pleased, oughtn’t you?’ she said. Her tone was kind, a little shy, almost deferential. As I looked at her, I was struck by a contrast. Her face was open and intelligent, with bright-blue eyes folded at the inner corners; under her left eye was a mole. Against her thick dark hair, her temples seemed delicate and white. One could call her pretty, certainly good-looking, but at the first glance one was thinking of the character in her face. That was where the contrast came, for her figure was elegant, soft and supple, more carefully and expensively dressed, so I thought, than any woman in the room. Her manner was at the same time direct and shy, warm but not at all flirtatious. I found myself talking to her as an ally.

Yes, I ought to be pleased, I said, it had been an important day for me. But this celebration wasn’t exactly what I might have imagined. The young woman I was fond of was not there, nor were any of my friends. On the other hand, Getliffe and some of his chums were having a remarkably good time.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t have arranged anything in advance, could you? I mean, you couldn’t have got your friends to stand by?’

‘I was touching wood too hard,’ I replied.

She nodded her head in comprehension. It would have been easy to tell her about my love-affair. She asked about my friends: I mentioned Charles March, and asked if she knew the family. Yes, she did, and she had met him once. It was agreeable standing there talking to her, and I thought she felt so too. We were the same age; she was kind and clever and we were not making any demands on each other. Meeting her seemed a good end to that day.

I told Charles about her. He was not sure who she was, but he was interested in her effect on me. Just then we had sharper eyes for each other than for ourselves. He saw that I had fallen deeply in love too early, and that Sheila had already left a mark on my life: he saw also that, too much committed to Sheila as I was, I often felt disproportionate gratitude to women who gave me what she could not. Such as ordinary simple friendliness, which was what I had received from Ann Simon.

With him, I saw just as clearly that he wanted to find someone to love: or rather he wanted to lose himself in someone. It was the opposite of my experience. Why he had missed it, I could not imagine: but now that he was consciously looking for it, I thought his chances were getting less.

That summer he went on living his idle life. He spent days at Lord’s and Wimbledon; took a season-ticket for the ballet; flirted with a young woman he met at a coming-out dance; arrived a good many times at Bryanston Square when the door was already unlocked for the morning.

The mantelpiece in his sitting-room was shining with invitations. Less than half came from Jewish houses. He was a highly eligible match, and hostesses were anxious to secure him. That year, he was eager to accept. His car drove with the others to Grosvenor Square, Knightsbridge, the houses round the Park. It was a hot brilliant summer, and sometimes I used to walk past those houses, whose lights shone out while the sky was still bright. Dance-tunes sounded through the open windows, and girls’ voices as they walked under the awning from the street.

Charles found someone to flirt with; but he did not find what he was looking for. Just before he went down to Mr March’s country house for the summer, he was sharper-tempered than I had known him.

9: Weekend in the Country

One afternoon in July, as I sat in the drawing-room at Bryanston Square, Mr March entered even more quickly than usual, said: ‘I’m always glad to have your company. But I’ve a great many worries to occupy me now,’ and went out again.

It sounded ominous: but I discovered that he was talking about the yearly move to Haslingfield, his country house in Hampshire. I also discovered that each year this move produced the same state of subdued commotion. Mr March sat in his study for hours every day for a fortnight ‘seeing if it’s possible to get anything safely down to that confounded house’, but what he did no one knew. The elder servants became infected with the atmosphere of imminent catastrophe — all except the butler who, finding me alone on one of these occasions, suddenly said: ‘I shouldn’t take much notice of Mr March, sir. He’d die if he didn’t worry. Believe me he would.’

I was asked down to Haslingfield for the last weekend in August. That year, for the first time, Katherine was acting as hostess, ‘not entirely a job to look for,’ she wrote. ‘Mr L may have intended it as a compliment, or as a sign that I’m getting on in years — but he still regards it as unlikely that any guests will receive or answer my invitations, or, if by any miracle they do come, that they’ll ever go away. However, I’ve invited Ann Simon for the same weekend as you. Mr L resisted having her, apparently on the grounds that she was a bit of a social come-down: actually her father’s a highly successful doctor. Still, it’s better to have Mr L angry about her than about other topics. Anyway, she’s coming. I thought you talked as though you were interested in her, when you met her after your first case…’

Incidentally, that first case was now not my only one. Another small job had come my way in July, and at the end of the month the solicitor whom I met at the Holfords’ sent me a case which any young man at my stage would have thought himself lucky to get. It was to be heard in the autumn, and through August I had been working at it obsessively hard.

Katherine had asked me to come down early, and so I took the train on the Friday afternoon, tired but encouraged. This case would get me known a bit; I had a foot in; the next year looked brighter. The Surrey fields passed by in the sunshine, the carriage cushions smelt stuffy in the heat, and I felt happy, sleepy, and without any premonition at all.

Charles met me with his car at Farnham. He was sunburned, and his hair slightly bleached. For a second, I thought his face had aged in the last two years. Before I could ask him anything, he was talking — with the special insistence, I thought, of someone who wants to keep questions away.

‘I’ve been doing absolutely nothing,’ he said, ‘except play tennis and read.’

As he drove through the lanes towards Hampshire, he let off a string of questions about the books he had just been reading. What did I think of the Sacco-Vanzetti case? What did the jury actually tell themselves when they were alone? How cynical can any of them have allowed themselves to be?

He had been reading the evidence: he drove with one hand, and used the other to draw diagrams in the air — the place where Sacco and Vanzetti were proved to stand and the street down which ‘eye-witnesses’ were later shown to have been travelling. ‘Going at this pace,’ said Charles, driving faster, ‘identifying a man out of sight, roughly behind that clump of pines. Those seem to be the facts. How did the jury and those witnesses — most of them ordinary decent people, you must assume that — face what they were doing? Face it in their own minds, I mean?’

It was the kind of detective story in real life, full of concrete facts and edged with injustice, that he could not resist. Far more than me, he had a passionate personal interest in justice for its own sake.

That afternoon, though, he was using it to distract us both. ‘Nothing’s happening,’ he said, when I asked him about himself. ‘Nothing in the world.’ Quickly, as though in self-defence, he pounced on me with another question about a book.

When I asked after Katherine, he glanced at me without expression. ‘She’s very well,’ he said. ‘She’s very well indeed.’

‘What do you mean?’

He shook his head. ‘You’d better see for yourself.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘I think she’s very happy.’

When I pressed him, he would not say any more. He returned to talk about literature, as he drove into a dark alley of trees; I noticed high banks, patches of sunshine, rabbit holes; I was listening, and at the same time trying to calculate the distance from the lodge. It turned out to be three miles to the house: ‘the advantage being,’ Charles said, ‘that Mr L can take his constitutional within his own territories.’

Mr March and Katherine were waiting in the courtyard. ‘Glad to see you arrive safely in my son’s car,’ said Mr March. ‘I wanted to send the chauffeur, but was overruled. I should have refused to answer for the consequences.’

He took me into the drawing-room, bigger and lighter than at Bryanston Square. A great bay of windows gave on to the terrace; below lay the tennis court, the shadow of a tree just beginning to touch one of the service lines. The view stretched, lush and wooded, to the blue Surrey hills; the English view, every square yard man-made, and yet with neither a house nor a path in sight.

Katherine poured out the tea. Mr March glanced at me.

‘You’re looking seedy,’ he said. ‘No! I’m prepared to believe that you can be allowed out of quarantine — if you admit that you’ve been living in a cellar.’

‘I’ve been working hard, Mr L,’ I said.

‘I’m very glad to hear it. It makes a great contrast to my deplorable family. I don’t propose to make any observations upon my son. As for my daughter, I suppose she can hardly be expected to perform any serious function — but she can’t even write foolproof letters to my guests. I detected her making a frightful ass of herself again on Tuesday; she admitted that she hadn’t sent Charles’ friend Francis Getliffe a list of the trains to Farnham.’

Mr March seemed in good spirits. Katherine said: ‘For the fifth time, Mr L, I didn’t send Francis the trains because he knows them as well as you do.’ She smiled. ‘And I object to being referred to as though I was feeble-minded. Why can’t I be expected to perform any serious function?’

‘Women can’t,’ said Mr March. ‘Apart from any particular reflection on you as shown by these various incompetences.’

The evening flowed on. Dinner in the late summer half-twilight was just as at Bryanston Square, with Mr March dressed and no one else: the routine was not altered, we went in on the stroke of eight, Mr March declaimed the menu. He talked on, as though he had been compulsorily silent for some time. Sir Philip had just been made a Parliamentary Secretary. Mr March’s astonishment and pride were each enormous. ‘I never thought any son of my father would reach the heights of a Minister. Possibly they considered,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that, as the Government is obviously about to go out in ignominy, it didn’t matter much whom they put in. Still, my father would have been extremely gratified.’ His reflections on Philip set him going on the main narrative-stream of his own journey round the world in the eighties, with subsidiary streams of, first, the attempt of Philip’s wife, ‘the biggest snob in the family’, to invite the Queen to tea: second, the adventures of Hannah and the Belgian refugees, ‘the only useful thing she ever tried to do, and of course she said it was a success: but no one else believed her’: third, his morning walk with Katherine yesterday, and her ignorance of the difficulties of moving back to Bryanston Square (in time for the Jewish New Year in September).

Only the cricket scores were allowed to interrupt him when we moved back to the drawing-room. It was still very warm, and the butler brought in iced drinks after the coffee. We lay back, sipping them: but the heat did not quieten Mr March.

Then, at 10.40 exactly, he broke off and performed his evening ritual. The whole household was in for the night, and so he went round the house with the butler to examine all the doors, after giving Charles instructions about the drawing-room windows. At last we heard him go upstairs to bed.

Charles asked Katherine when the other two would arrive: he said (I did not catch the meaning for a moment): ‘I still think you could have found a more ingenious excuse.’ ‘That’s monstrous,’ said Katherine. She smiled. Her hair was tousled over her forehead; she usually managed to become untidy, I thought, by this time of night. She appealed to me: ‘I told you Mr L is prepared to disapprove of Ann in advance, for reasons best known to himself. So I decided we wanted someone else to soothe him down — and Francis is the obvious choice, you can’t deny it. It’s a perfectly good excuse.’ ‘You only decided it was good,’ Charles said, ‘after concealing it from me for two days.’

‘Privilege of hostess.’ Katherine smiled again. ‘Ah well — Lewis, don’t you agree that Mr L is getting more vigorous the older he becomes? I shall have to marry before he’s exhausted me completely.’

She was laughing: but, as we listened to those words ‘I shall have to marry…’ and heard their caressing pleasure, we knew that she was in love.

Soon she went to bed herself.

‘She liked being told that it was a bad excuse,’ I said.

Charles said: ‘She’s only realized quite recently, I think.’

‘When did you?’

‘Shouldn’t you say,’ said Charles, ‘that she’s been getting fond of him for months?’

‘He’s very fond of her,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded. Charles broke out: ‘I just can’t tell whether he’s in love, perhaps it’s harder for me to tell than anyone.’

For a time we were silent. Then I asked, because the thought was in both our minds: ‘How much has Mr L noticed?’

‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’

We were each thinking of her chances of being happy. Neither of us knew whether Francis wanted to marry her. If he did, I could not foresee what it would mean, her marrying a Gentile.

Nevertheless, as Charles spoke of her, there was a trace of envy in his voice. Partly because he might be losing her; but mainly, I thought that night, because she had been taken up by an overmastering emotion, because she had lost herself and been swept away.

We talked until late: of Katherine, Francis, Mr March, my work, and again of the books he had been reading. He had no news of his own.

10: A Walk with Mr March

At last we tiptoed up the broad slippery staircase, and went to our rooms. But in my case not to sleep, immediately at least; for the bedrooms at Haslingfield carried comfort to such a point that it was difficult to sleep at all.

There was a rack of books, picked by Charles, several of which were just out — a Huxley, the latest of the Scott-Moncrieff translations, the books we had talked about that afternoon. There was a plate of sandwiches, a plate of fruit, a plate of biscuits. A Thermos flask of tea and one of iced lemonade. A small bottle of brandy. After one had had a snack, read a book or two, and finished off the drinks, one could snatch a few hours’ sleep — until, quite early in the morning, a footman began padding about the room, taking out clothes and drawing curtains. Which for me, who liked sleeping in the dark, finished the night for good.

There was nothing for it but to get up. Although I arrived in the breakfast-room early, one place at the table had already been occupied; Mr March had been and gone. As I chose my breakfast from the dishes on the sideboard, I was puzzled for a moment. There were several plates of fried tongue, none of bacon. For a visitor used to rich houses, that was the only unfamiliar thing at Bryanston Square and Haslingfield.

Katherine and Charles both came down late to breakfast. Twice, while I was sitting alone, Mr March entered rapidly, said ‘Good morning’ without stopping, and changed the newspaper he was holding out in front of him; first The Times for the Daily Telegraph, and then the Daily Telegraph for the Manchester Guardian.

It was another hot day. Katherine was complaining at the prospect of her five-mile walk with Mr March before lunch; why does he insist on a companion, she said, pretending that she was only complaining as a joke. I thought that, as she waited for Francis to arrive, she did not relish being alone with Mr March. So I volunteered; and at exactly half past eleven we set off down the drive at Mr March’s walking pace, which was not less than four miles an hour. He wore his deerstalker, and before we had walked four hundred yards took it off, saying: ‘I must mop my bald pate.’ Several times he groaned, without slowing down: ‘I’m cracking up! I’m cracking up!’

Nothing interrupted his walking, he neither slackened nor quickened his pace. The only interruptions to his talking were those he made himself. His feats of total recall were as disconcerting as ever. For the first time I heard, out of the blue, the end of that gnomic story about his nephew Robert on the steps of the St James’s, which had tantalized me on my first visit to Bryanston Square. It appeared that Robert, tired of waiting for briefs, had taken to going to theatres, not just to pass the time or because of a disinterested passion for drama, but because he had conceived the idea of filling up his leisure by writing a play: all he was doing was study the technique. In Mr March’s view, this procedure was ill-judged, since he regarded it as axiomatic that Robert did not possess a shred of talent.

We turned at the lodge gates and made off by a path among the trees. Mr March chuckled and pointed back to the lodge.

‘My son Charles,’ he said, ‘got himself into an unfortunate predicament a fortnight ago last Saturday. I had Oliver Mendl staying with me for the weekend. Of course I knew that he obeyed the Lawgiver more strictly than I do myself. His father was just the same. When he visited us, I used to have to open his letters on Saturday morning. Though I noticed that he always read them quick enough if he thought they contained anything to his advantage. Oliver invited Charles to come for a stroll, and in the circumstances Charles couldn’t very well refuse. It looked very threatening that morning. I said so as soon as I woke up: I was ten minutes later than usual, because my daughter Katherine had kept me awake by inconsiderately having a bath before she went to bed the previous night. She accuses me of shouting through the wall “You’ve done me in. I shall never get to sleep again, never again”. I strongly advised them to take overcoats or at least umbrellas. However, they preferred their own opinion and they’d just reached the lodge when it started to rain with violence. The only drop of rain we’ve had since July 19: remember you’re only allowed four inches in your bath. Charles showed more gumption than you might expect: he suggested ringing up from the lodge and asking Taylor to bring a car. It might have been a ridiculous suggestion, of course: you can’t expect to get a car unless you make proper arrangements in advance. As it happened, Taylor was not occupied between 10.30 and 12 that morning. So Charles could have obtained his car, but unfortunately he didn’t. Because Oliver begged him to order the car for himself, but depressed Charles by adding: “Of course I can’t use it today, I shall have to walk.” The Lawgiver forbade people of my religion to make journeys on the Sabbath: why, I’ve never been able to understand. Well, though I oughtn’t to pay him compliments, my son Charles is a polite young man with people he doesn’t know well. Hannah says he isn’t, but she’s only seen him when she’s present herself. On this occasion he felt compelled to walk back with Oliver. We heard an infernal noise when they got back, and I went out and found him standing on a towel in the hall. He expressed himself angrily whenever I pointed out how he could have avoided disaster.’

Mr March was beaming with laughter. Then he added, quietly, and to my complete surprise: ‘Of course, he’s not bad-tempered as a rule. He wouldn’t have minded so much if it hadn’t been caused by the religion.’

He went on: ‘Herbert was the same forty years ago. At the time when he was getting up to his monkey tricks about studying music. He didn’t much like to be reminded that he belonged to our religion.’

Mr March added: ‘Of course, Herbert found that troubles of that nature passed away as he got older. I am inclined to think that the thickening of one’s skin is the only conceivable advantage of becoming old. If my son’s trouble was entirely due to his thin skin, I should cease to have periods of worry about him. But it isn’t so.’

Mr March talked no more on our walk home. We arrived at the house a few minutes before his standard time of 12.45, and found Katherine eating an early lunch before going out to meet Ann Simon.

11: Mr March Ends a Reflection

Charles and I were alone at lunch with Mr March, who was still half-saddened, half-anxious, as he had been on the way home. I was certain by now that he was innocent about Katherine. As he talked to Charles, he had no thought of trouble from her. His concern was all for his son; he did not imagine any other danger to his peace of mind.

He told some stories, but they were shot through with his affection for Charles. Because he was in that mood, he told us more than I had heard of his early life. At once one knew, more sharply than on the day he watched Charles’ case, how much of himself he was re-creating in his son.

He described his own career. He talked, not as vivaciously as usual, but with his natural lack of pretence. ‘I never made much progress,’ he said.

His father and Philip’s, the first Sir Philip, had been the most effective of all the Marches; he had controlled the March firm of foreign bankers and brokers when it was at its peak. ‘And in my father’s days,’ said Mr March, ‘they counted as more than a business house. Of course it would be different now. Everything’s on too big a scale for a private firm. Look at the Rothschilds. They used to be the most influential family in Europe. And they’ve kept going after we finished, they’ve not done badly, and what are they now? Just merchant bankers in a fairly lucrative way of business.’

When his father died, Mr March, who would have preferred to go to the university, was brought in to fill a vacancy in the firm. ‘It was a good opening,’ he said to us, nearly fifty years after. ‘I wasn’t attracted specially to business, but I hadn’t any particular inclinations. I hoped you would have,’ he said to Charles.

It was not during this conversation, but previously, that I had the curiosity to ask him about the routine of foreign banking, when he first joined the firm. There had still been an air about it, so it seemed. Each morning, the letters came in from the Marches’ correspondents: there had been two in Paris, and one in each of the other European capitals, including ‘the very capable fellow at St Petersburg. We never believed he was a Russian’. Since the bank started, they had depended on their correspondents, a group of men very similar in gifts and outlook to the foreign-based journalists of the twentieth century. In 1880 the Marches were still better informed, over a whole area of facts where politics and economics fused, than any newspaper. The March correspondents acquired a curious mixture of cynicism and world-view. Just because their finding the truth could be measured in terms of money, they learned what the truth was. All through 1870 one of the Paris correspondents was predicting war, and war in which the French army would be outclassed: Mr March’s father cleared some hundred thousand pounds. Right through the nineteenth century, up to the end of the bank in 1896, the foreign letters added sarcastic footnotes to history: they were unmoral, factual, hard-baked, much more hard-baked because they did not set out to be.

The secret correspondent declined in value as communications got faster. The Marches’ telephone number was London 2; but they did not time their moves as certainly as when Mr March’s father opened his despatches in the morning. Mr March gallantly telephoned in French to Paris and Brussels every day as the bourses opened; but as the nineties passed by, neither his uncles nor Philip, nor he above all, felt they were in touch, even as much in touch as ten years before.

Of course the scale of things was altering under their hands. Their loans of a million pounds or so to the Argentine or Brazil no longer went very far; they were coming near to a world of preposterous size — a world dangerous, mad, exciting beyond measure, and, as Mr March decided, no place for a financier of distinctly anxious temperament. It was about this time that the legend sprang up of his only being able to control his worry by balancing the firm’s accounts each night.

They might have stayed in longer, but for a characteristic weakness against which Mr March struggled in vain. They would never take anyone outside the family into the firm. As Mr March argued and quarrelled with his uncles, he kept protesting that one man of a different sort from the Marches might vitalize them. But they were loyal to the family: the Marches had started the bank a hundred years before, they had controlled it ever since, they could not give power to a stranger. In fact, as they were good pickers of men, Mr March’s policy would probably have made them richer; but, whatever happened, neither they nor any other ‘merchant banker in a fairly lucrative way of business’ would have stayed in usefully for long: the twentieth century needed, not single millions, but tens and hundreds of millions, and could only be financed by the joint stock banks.

So they ceased business in 1896. They had not made much money in the nineties, but each of the five partners retired with a comfortable fortune. Mr March was just thirty-two. As the three of us sat at lunch he was talking of that time.

‘I was still a bachelor,’ he said, ‘I thought I possessed enough for my requirements. But it was a pity, a firm like ours terminating after a hundred years. I sometimes think we should have continued. But we hadn’t improved our position noticeably since my father died. Of course if I had been like him, I should have carried on successfully. But I didn’t do much. My temperament was quite unsuitable for business. I was too shy and anxious.’

He was accepting himself as always, but his eyes did not leave Charles and he was speaking with regret. Success, in the world of his father and uncles, meant multiplying one’s fortune and adding to one’s influence among solid men. Mr March, not valuing it as much as they did, knew nevertheless that he would have pursued it if his temperament had not let him down; he would have kept the firm going, or joined others, as his brother Philip had done. While in fact he had come to terms with himself and retired. He had been happier, he had followed his nature; but he made no excuses, and it meant admitting to himself that, compared with those others, he was not so good a man.

‘I was too shy and anxious’ — he had taken himself for granted and lived unrestrainedly according to his own comfort. Like many people who are obsessed by every detail in the world outside, he was driven to simplify his life. Business was unbearable with a real anxiety every day, and instead he let himself loose on anxieties such as locking the door at night. Like many people sensitized to others’ feelings, he was driven to escape more and more from company — except of those he had known so long that they did not count. More than any other March, he came to live entirely inside the family. He retired from any competition (Charles had said the same of himself the night be announced he was abandoning the law), met few new faces, and enjoyed himself as he felt inclined.

His happiness grew as he lived at the centre of his family, and his own most extravagant stories began with his marriage. It was a good start, as he stood with his bride on Victoria Station, to arrange for a cab to meet their train on Monday afternoon exactly one month later. After they had been a week at Mentone, another thought occurred to him of a contingency left unprovided for. He walked alone to the post office and sent off a telegram, reserving for his wife a place next to himself in the Jewish Cemetery at Golders Green.

Thus he plunged among twenty-five years of marriage — not at all tranquil years, because he could not be tranquil anywhere, but full of the life he wanted and in which he breathed his native air. He was passionately fond of his wife, and he was occupied with plenty of excitements, major and minor; the major excitements about his children as they grew up, and the minor ones of his fortune, Bryanston Square, Haslingfield, the servants, the whole economico-personal system of which he was the core.

He had not been bored. He had enjoyed his life. He still enjoyed it. He would have taken it over again on the same terms, and gone through it with as much zest.

And yet, it was foreign to his nature not to be frank with himself, and he felt that he had paid a price. Underneath this life which suited him, which soaked up the violence underneath and let him become luxuriantly himself, he knew that he had lost some self-respect. He had been happier than most men, but it meant that he chose to run away from the contest.

Even Mr March, the most realistic of men, could not always forgive himself for his own nature. He could not quite forget the illusion, which we all have, most strongly when we are young, that every kind of action is possible to us if only we use our will. He felt as we all do, when we have slowly come to terms with our temperament and no longer try to be different from ourselves; we may be happier now, but we cannot help looking back to the days when we struggled against the sight of our limitations, when, miserable and conflict-ridden perhaps, we still in flashes of hope held the whole world in our hands. For the loss, as we come to know ourselves, is that now we know what we can never do.

Mr March felt envious of himself as a young man, not yet reconciled, not yet abdicating from his hopes of success. There were times when he called himself a failure. It was then that he invested all those rejected hopes in Charles; for everything that one aspired to, and had to dismiss as one discovered one’s weakness, could be built up again in a son. Could be built up more extravagantly, as a matter of fact; because, even in youth, the frailties of one’s own temperament were always liable to bring one back to realism, while the frailties of a son’s could be laughed off.

For a long time Mr March secretly expected a great deal from Charles’ gifts, more than he expressed during any of their arguments when Charles gave up the law. I remembered the end of that evening, after their quarrel, when suddenly he said ‘I have always wanted something for you’ and broke off the conversation, as though he were ashamed.

This afternoon at Haslingfield he was speaking in the same tone, concerned, simple, and with no trace of reproach. Months had passed. So far as he knew, Charles was still idle and ready to follow his own escape; Mr March could see his son also driven to waste himself. As he told us of his career at the bank, Mr March was speaking of his fears for Charles. When he let us see his own regret, he was desperately anxious that he and his son should not be too much alike. He looked at Charles as he told his stories, in a voice more subdued than I had heard it. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do much. I wasn’t the man to make much of my opportunities.’

12: First and Second Sight

After lunch Mr March left us, and Charles and I went out to the deck-chairs in the garden. It was glaring and hot out of doors, by contrast with the shaded dining-room. Charles, affected by his father’s self-description, sat by me without speaking.

I heard a car run up the drive. A quarter of an hour later, Ann and Katherine came down from the house towards us. I noticed that Ann’s walk had the kind of stiff-legged grace one sometimes saw in actresses, as though it had been studied and controlled. By Katherine’s side, it made her look a fashionable woman: she was wearing a yellow summer frock, and carrying a parasol: she was still too far off for us to see her face.

When they came up to us, and she was introduced to Charles, it was a surprise, just as it had been on the night of Getliffe’s party, to see her smile, natural, direct, and shy. In the same manner, both direct and shy, she said to him: ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

Charles, standing up, her hand in his, said: ‘I believe we have.’

He added: ‘Yes, I remember the evening.’

She had spoken to him with friendliness. Although he was polite, I did not hear the same tone in his voice. He looked at Katherine. There was a glint in his eye I did not understand.

Ann lay back in her deckchair, and for an instant closed her eyes, basking in the heat. With her face on one side, the line between dark hair and temple was sharp, the skin paper-white under the bright sun. She looked prettier than I had seen her. Charles was glancing at her: I could not tell whether he was attracted: the moment we began to talk, he was provoked.

Sitting up, she asked me a question about Herbert Getliffe, going back to our conversation at the party.

‘I’ve heard a bit more about him since then,’ she said.

‘What have you heard?’

She hesitated; she seemed both interested and uneasy. ‘I couldn’t help wondering—’

‘What about?’

‘Well, why you ever chose to work with him.’

Charles interrupted: ‘You’d better tell us why you think he shouldn’t.’

‘I warn you that you’re going to meet his brother soon,’ said Katherine.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Ann said to her, ‘if Herbert Getliffe is a friend of yours.’

‘No. I’ve never met the man,’ said Katherine, who was nevertheless blushing.

‘You’ve gone too far to back out, you know,’ Charles broke in again. ‘What have you really got against Herbert Getliffe?’

Ann looked straight at him.

‘I don’t want to overdo it,’ she said uncomfortably and steadily. ‘I can only go on what I’ve been told — but isn’t he the worst lawyer who’s ever earned £4,000 a year?’

‘Where did you hear that?’ asked Charles.

‘I was told by a man I know.’

Charles’ eyes were bright, he was ready (I found the irony agreeable) to defend Getliffe with spirit. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘your friend isn’t by any chance a less successful rival at the Bar?’

‘His name is Ronald Porson. He happens to have been practising out in Singapore,’ said Ann.

‘He’s really a very unsuccessful rival, isn’t he?’

‘He’s a far more intelligent person than Getliffe,’ she said. With Charles getting at her, her diffidence had not become greater, but much less. Just as his voice had an edge to it, so had hers.

‘Even if that’s so,’ Charles teased her, ‘for success, you know, intelligence is a very minor gift.’

‘I should like to know what you do claim for Getliffe.’

‘He’s got intuition,’ said Charles.

‘What do you really mean by that?’

‘Why,’ said Charles, with his sharpest smile, ‘you must know what intuition is. At any rate, you must have read about it in books.’

Ann gazed at him without expression, her eyes clear blue. For a second it seemed that she was going to make it a quarrel. She shrugged her shoulders, laughed, and lay back again in the sun.

Soon Katherine asked her to play a game of tennis. Ann tried to get out of it, saying how bad she was. I imagined that it was her normal shyness, until we saw her play. Katherine, who had a useful forehand drive, banged the ball past her. By the end of the fourth game, we realized that Ann was not only outclassed but already tired.

‘Are you sure that you ought to be doing this?’ called Charles.

‘It’s all right.’ She was panting.

‘Are you sure that you’re quite fit?’

‘Not perfectly. But I want to go on.’

‘We’d better stop,’ said Katherine.

‘If you do, I shall claim the game.’ She was still short of breath, but her face was set in an obstinate, headstrong smile.

She served. They played another game. Charles was watching her with a frown. At the end of the set he went on to the court. She was giddy, and clutched his arm; he took her to her chair. Soon she was moving her head from side to side, as though making sure that the giddiness had passed. She smiled at Charles. He said in relief: ‘Why didn’t you behave reasonably?’

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Ann.

He scolded her: ‘Why did you insist on playing on after you’d tired yourself out?’

‘I was ill in the spring, you see.’ She was explaining her collapse.

‘Would it upset you,’ said Charles, ‘if I sent for a doctor?’

‘I’d ask you to if I needed one, I promise you I would.’

‘Just to relieve my own mind?’

‘I’d ask you to, if there was the slightest need.’

‘There really isn’t any?’

‘You’ll only irritate one if you fetch him.’

‘I don’t mind that—’

‘You haven’t had a doctor as a father, have you?’

‘You really don’t think there’s any need? You know enough about yourself to be sure?’ Charles reiterated.

Their sparring had vanished. They were speaking with confidence in each other.

‘You see,’ said Ann, ‘I used to have these bouts before. They’re passing off now.’

Just then Mr March walked down after his afternoon sleep. Before he reached us, he was watching Ann and his son. Then he looked only at Ann, and his manner to her, from the moment Katherine introduced them, impressed us all.

‘I am delighted to have you adorning my house,’ said Mr March. ‘It isn’t often that my house has been so charmingly adorned.’

It was a speech of deliberate gallantry. It was so emphatic that Ann became flustered; she smiled back, but she could not make much of a reply.

Mr March went on: ‘I hope my son has not been excessively negligent in entertaining you until I arrived.’

‘Not at all,’ said Ann, still at a loss.

‘I am relieved to hear it,’ said Mr March.

‘But I didn’t give Katherine much of a game at tennis,’ she said over-brightly, casting round for words.

‘You shouldn’t let them inveigle you into action too soon after your arrival. I might remark that you’re paler than you ought to be, no doubt as a result of their lack of consideration.’

‘I’ve been looked after very nicely, Mr March—’

‘It’s extremely polite of you to say so,’ he said.

‘Really I have.’ She was getting over the first impact, and she answered without constraint, smiling both at him and Charles.

Soon afterwards Francis arrived, and I watched Katherine’s eyes as his plunging stride brought him through the drawing-room, over the terrace, down to the lawn. Tea was brought out to us, and we ate raspberries and cream in the sunshine.

After tea we played tennis; then, when Mr March went in to dress, Katherine took Francis for a walk round the rose garden, and I left the other two together. I strolled down the drive before going to my room; the stocks were beginning to smell, now the heat of the day was passing, and the scent came to me as though to heighten, and at the same time to touch with languor, the emotions I had been living among that afternoon.

When I left Ann and Charles, their faces had been softened and glowing. No one would say that either was in love, but each was in the state when they knew at least that love was possible. They were still safe; they need not meet again; he could still choose not to ask her, she could still refuse; and yet, while they did not know each other, while they were still free, there was a promise of joy.

It seemed a long time since I had known that state, I thought, as the smell of the stocks set me indulging my own mood. It had gone too soon, and I had discovered other meanings in love. I wondered how long it would last for them.

Evening was falling, and as I turned back towards the house its upper windows shone like blazing shields in the last of the sunlight. Looking up, I felt a trace of worry about Francis and Katherine; I felt a trace of self-pity because Charles and Ann might be lucky; but really, walking back to the house through the warm air, I was enjoying being a spectator, I was excited about it all.

13: Gamble

At dinner Mr March was not subdued and acceptant, as he had been at that table a few hours before. Instead, he intervened in each conversation and produced some of his more unpredictable retorts. So far as I could notice, his glance did not stay too long on Katherine, whose face was fresh with happiness as she talked to Francis. He interrupted her, but only as he interrupted the rest of us, in order to stay the centre of attention. It was hard to be sure whether his high spirits were genuine or not.

Once or twice Mr March waited for a response from Ann, who sat, dressed all in black except for an aquamarine brooch on her breast, at his right hand. She was quiet, she was deferential, she laughed at his stories, but it was not until after dinner that Mr March forced her into an argument.

We had moved into the drawing-room, and Mr March sent for the footman to open more windows. There we sat, the lights on, the curtains undrawn and the windows open, while Mr March proceeded by way of the day’s temperature to talk to Francis, who was going to Corsica for a month’s holiday before the October term.

‘I hope you will insist on ignoring any salad they may be misguided enough to offer you. My daughter last year failed to show competent discretion in that respect. Caroline made a similar frightful ass of herself just before the earthquake at Messina. The disaster might have been avoided if she had possessed the gumption to keep sufficiently suspicious of all foreigners—’

‘If you mean me, Mr L,’ Katherine said, ‘I’ve proved to you that being ill in Venice can’t have had anything to do with what I ate abroad.’

‘I refuse to accept your assurances,’ said Mr March. ‘I hope you too will refuse to accept my daughter’s assurances,’ he said to Francis. In each remark he made to Francis, Katherine was listening for an undertone: but she heard none, and protested loudly because she was relieved. Mr March shouted her down, and went on talking to Francis: ‘I should be sorry if my daughter’s example lured you into risks that would probably be fatal to your health.’

‘As I’ve spent an hour before dinner trying to persuade him not to climb mountains without a guide,’ said Katherine, ‘I call that rather hard.’

‘She definitely disapproves of the trip,’ said Francis. ‘She can’t be blamed for not discouraging me enough.’

‘I should advise you to ignore any of her suggestions for your welfare,’ said Mr March.

It sounded no more than genial back-chat. Katherine kept showing her concern for Francis. She could not resist showing it: to do so was a delight. Yet Mr March gave no sign that he saw him as a menace.

Mr March left off talking to Francis, and addressed us all: ‘My experience is that foreigners can always tempt one to abandon any sensible habit. I have never been able to understand why it is considered necessary to intrude oneself among them on the pretext of obtaining pleasure. Hannah always said that she came to life abroad, but I don’t believe that she was competent to judge. Since I married my wife I have preferred to live in my own houses where foreigners are unlikely to penetrate. The more I am compelled to hear of foreign countries, the less I like them. I am sure that my charming guest will agree with me,’ he said confidentially to Ann.

Ann was embarrassed. ‘I don’t think I should go quite as far as that, Mr March,’ she said.

‘You’ll come to it in time, you’ll come to it in time,’ cried Mr March. ‘Why, you must be too young to remember the catastrophe foreigners involved us in fifteen years ago.’

‘I was nine,’ she said.

‘I am surprised to hear that you weren’t even more of an infant. I should be prepared to guarantee that you will keep your present youth and beauty until you are superannuated. But still you can’t conceivably remember the origins of that unfortunate catastrophe. You can’t remember how we were bamboozled by foreigners and entangled in continental concerns that were no affair of ours—’

Mr March went on to develop a commentary, jingoistic and reactionary, on the circumstances of the 1914–18 war. He had the habit of pretending to be at the extreme limit of reaction, just because he knew that Charles’ friends were nearly all of them on the left. But we did not argue with him; when politics came up among the senior Marches, we usually avoided trouble and kept our mouths shut,

As she listened, Ann was frowning. She glanced at Charles, then at me, as though expecting us to contradict. When Mr March paused for a breathing space, she hesitated; she started to talk and checked herself. But the next time he stopped, she did not hesitate. In a tone timid, gentle but determined, she said: ‘I’m sorry, Mr March, but I’m afraid I can’t believe it.’

‘I should be glad to be enlightened on what you do believe,’ said Mr March, preserving his gallant manner.

Still quietly and uneasily, Ann told him, without any covering up, that she did not accept any of his views about the war, or nations, or the causes of politics.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that we can’t understand anything unless we take account of what those people call the class struggle.’

Mr March’s voice had become loud; his face was heavy with anger.

Ann’s tone was more subdued, but she continued without hesitation: ‘I’m afraid I should have to say just that.’

‘Economic poppycock,’ Mr March burst out.

‘It’s a tenable theory, Mr L,’ Charles interrupted. ‘You can’t dispose of it by clamour.’

‘My guest can’t dispose of it by claptrap,’ said Mr March. Then he suppressed his temper, and spoke to Ann in his most friendly and simple way: ‘Obviously we take different views of the world. I presume that you think it will improve?’

‘Yes,’ said Ann.

‘You are optimistic, as you should be at your age. I am inclined to consider that it will continue to get worse. I console myself that it will last my time.’

‘Yes,’ Mr March added, as he glanced round the bright room, ‘it will last my time.’

He had spoken in a tone matter-of-fact and yet elegiac. He did not want to argue with Ann any more. But then I saw that Ann was not ready to let it go. Her eyes were bright. For all her shyness, she was not prepared to be discreet, as I was. Perhaps she was contemptuous of that kind of discretion. I had an impression that she was gambling.

‘I’m sure it won’t last mine,’ she said.

Mr March was taken aback, and she added: ‘I’m also sure that it oughtn’t to.’

‘You anticipate that there will be a violent change within your lifetime?’ said Mr March.

‘Of course,’ said Ann, with absolute conviction.

She had spoken with such force that we were all silent for an instant. Then Mr March said: ‘You’ve no right to anticipate it.’

‘Of course she has,’ Charles broke in. ‘She wants a good world. This is the only way in which she can see it happening.’ He smiled at her. ‘The only doubt is whether the world afterwards would be worth it.’

‘I’m sure of that,’ she said.

‘You’ve no right to be sure,’ said Mr March.

‘Why don’t you think I have?’ she asked quietly.

‘Because women would be better advised not to concern themselves with these matters.’

Mr March had spoken with acute irritability, but Ann broke suddenly into laughter. It was laughter so spontaneous, so unresentfully accepting the joke against herself, that Mr March was first taken at a loss and then reassured. He watched her eyes screw up, her self-control dissolve, as she abandoned herself to laughter. She looked very young.

Charles took the chance to smooth the party down. He acted as impresario for Mr March and led him on to his best stories. At first Mr March was still disturbed: but he was melted by his son’s care, and by the warmth and well being we could all feel that night in Charles.

Katherine joined in. Between them they poured all their attention on to Mr March, as though making up for the exhilaration of the last few hours.

They succeeded in getting Mr March on to the subject of Ann’s family. He told her: ‘Of course, you’re not one of the real Simons,’ and she proved that she was a distant cousin of the Florence Simon whom I had met at the family dinner at Bryanston Square and who even Mr March had to admit was ‘real’. From then till 10.40 Mr March explored in what remote degree he and Ann were related; stories of fourth and fifth cousins ‘making frightful asses of themselves’ forty years ago became immersed in the timeless continuum in which Mr March, more extravagantly than on a normal night, let himself go.

When Mr March had rattled each door in the hall and gone upstairs, Katherine said to Ann:

‘Well, I hope you’re not too bothered after all that.’ Ann shook her head.

‘Did you want me to keep out?’ she said to Charles. Charles was smiling.

Francis asked: ‘What would your own father have said if a strange young woman had started talking about the revolution?’

‘Didn’t you agree with me?’ she said, quite sharply. She knew that Francis was on her side: he was as radical as his fellow scientists. Deferential as she often sounded, she was not to be browbeaten. Then she smiled too.

‘I won’t do it again,’ she said. ‘But tonight was a special occasion.’

Again I had the impression that she had been gambling. Whatever the gamble had been, it was over now, and she was relaxed.

Making it up with Francis, she said to him: ‘As for my father, he wouldn’t have had the spirit to argue. Even when I was growing up, he’d managed to tire himself out.’

Although she seemed to be speaking to Francis, she was really speaking to Charles. One could guess from her tone that she loved him. One could guess too that she was not often relaxed enough to talk like this. She smiled again, almost as though her upper lip was twitching, and said:

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

It was Katherine who answered her:

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

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

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

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

‘Not over your father?’

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

‘What was it about then?’

‘Mostly about being a Jew,’ said Charles.

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ said Katherine.

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

‘Yes,’ said Katherine again.

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

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

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

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

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

14: Borrowing a Room

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

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

‘I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

‘What is it?’

He was speaking with diffidence, with unusual stiffness.

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

‘If you tell me what it is—’

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

‘What in God’s name is it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15: Believing One’s Ears

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course he was,’ said Ann.

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

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

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

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

She took up the attack.

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

I hesitated.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not quite.’

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

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

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

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

‘Has he?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16: Choice of a Profession

One afternoon in January, I went to tea at Bryanston Square and discovered that Charles had just confided in Katherine. I discovered it through their habit of repeating themselves. When I arrived, they were talking of a rumour that Aunt Caroline had been making enquiries about Francis Getliffe: how often did he go to Bryanston Square? How often did he go when Charles was otherwise engaged? Katherine was agitated and excited. There was another rumour that Caroline was considering whether she ought to speak to Mr March. Was it true? Then Katherine said, harking back to what they had been saying:

‘I suppose he won’t mind this idea of yours. Don’t you agree that he won’t mind it?’

‘Can you give me a good reason why he should?’

‘It will be a shock to him, you realize that?’ she said. She looked at me, and went on: ‘Does Lewis know anything about this, by the way?’

‘He’s had a bit of warning.’ Charles then said to me: ‘I’ve told Katherine this afternoon that I’m going to try to become a doctor.’

Since that hint in my room he had not asked my advice nor anyone else’s. Only Ann had been inside his secret. He was presenting us, just as he had done when he gave up the law, with a resolution already made. By the time he told us, it was made once for all, and the rest of us could take it or leave it.

Katherine was frowning. ‘I can’t understand why you should do this.’

‘It isn’t as difficult as all that, is it?’

‘You could do so many things.’

‘I’ve evaded them so far with singular success,’ said Charles.

‘Is it the best scheme?’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t you think he’ll be wasted, Lewis?’

‘It’s exactly to prevent myself being wasted that I’ve thought of this.’ Charles looked at her with a sarcastic, affectionate grin. ‘I agree, I wouldn’t like to feel that I had wasted my time altogether. The chief advantage of becoming a doctor is precisely that it might prevent me doing that. I shall still be some use in a dim way even if I turn out to be completely obscure. It’s the only occupation I can find where you can be absolutely undistinguished and still flatter yourself a bit.’

‘That’s all very well for one of nature’s saints,’ said Katherine. ‘But are you sure it’s your line?’

Charles did not answer. He hesitated. He was embarrassed. Sharply, he went on to a new line:

‘I’ve told you, there’s a perfectly good practical reason. You both know, I’m hoping that Ann will marry me. We’ve got to look a reasonable way ahead. I suppose Mr L will make me independent when I’m twenty-five, that is in April. He’s always promised to do that, or when I marry, “whichever shall be the earlier”, as he insists on saying. And I suppose I shall come into his money in time. But don’t you see? I daren’t count on any of this lasting many years. If I come into Mr L’s money, I daren’t count on that lasting many years. Too much may happen in the world. It’s not exactly likely we shall be able to live on investments all our lives. Well, I think there’s more security as a doctor than as anything else I could take up. Whatever happens to the world, it’s rather unlikely that a doctor will starve.’

Those words sounded strange, in the drawing-room at Bryanston Square, from the heir to one of the March fortunes. But we had already begun to speak in those terms. On this winter evening when Charles was talking, such an anxiety seemed, of course, remote, not quite real, not comparable for an instant with that which Katherine felt when she saw a letter from Aunt Caroline waiting for Mr March.

When Charles told Mr March a few days later, he gave the same justification — the desire to be some use, the need to be secure, though he did not mention Ann’s name.

For some time, Charles’ insight failed him; he did not understand how his father had responded. Mr March began by opposing: but that was nothing unusual, and Charles was not disturbed. Mr March’s first remarks were on the plane of reason. He put forward entirely sensible arguments why Charles could not hope to become a doctor. He was nearly twenty-five. At best he would be well into the thirties before he was qualified. He had had no serious scientific education, and was, like all the Marches, clumsy with his hands. It would be an intolerable self-discipline to go through years of uncongenial study. ‘You might begin it,’ said Mr March, ‘but you’d give it up after a few months. You’ve never shown the slightest disposition to persevere with anything when you’re not interested. You’ve never shown the slightest disposition to persevere with anything at all. I refuse to believe that you’re remotely capable of it.’

That was the end of the first discussion. Mr March’s tone had become not quite so reasonable. As never before in all their quarrels over his career, Charles heard a gibe behind it. Mr March used to speak about his son’s idleness with sympathy and regret. For the first time a gibe sprang out, harsh, almost triumphant.

Even so, Charles was slow to see what Mr March was feeling. The arguments went on, and became angrier. Mr March ceased to speak with caution; he was behaving not like a man troubled, or even sad and wounded, but one in a storm of savage distress. It seemed fantastic, but at last Charles had to admit that he had not seen his father in a state as dark as this before.

When Charles told me about it, he was enough upset to stay late in my room, retracing the arguments, trying to find a motive for Mr March’s behaviour. Charles was having to guard his own temper. He was resentful because he had provoked a response like this — a response deeper, angrier, and more ravaged than anyone in his senses could have expected.

It was no use my telling Charles that this was a torment of passion; he knew that as well and better than I did. He knew too that, as with so many of the torments of passion, Mr March’s distress was bitter out of all proportion to what appeared to have provoked it. It seemed just like love, I thought to myself, when a trivial neglect, such as not receiving a letter for a day or two, may suddenly make one seethe with anguish and hatred: the event, of course, being a trigger and not a cause. So Mr March heard Charles say that he was going to abandon a life of idleness and become a doctor, and was immediately shaken by passion such as no other action of his son had ever roused.

For day after day he got less controlled, not more. One night Charles was so worn down that I walked back with him, some time after one in the morning, to Bryanston Square. As we stood outside, he asked if I would mind coming in, he would like to go on talking. Before we had sat five minutes in the drawing-room, there was a heavy shuffle outside and Mr March pushed open the door.

Just by itself his appearance would have been bizarre. He was wearing red square-toed slippers and a bright-blue dressing-gown on which glittered rising-sun decorations, as though he was covered with the insignia of an unknown order. But the extraordinary thing about him was his face. For some reason difficult to understand, he had covered his eyelids, the skin under the eyes, in fact all the skin within the orbital area, with white ointment. He looked something like the end-man in an old-fashioned minstrel show.

He was scowling: his courtesy had been swept away, and he entered the room without any sign that I existed. He said to Charles: ‘I’ve been considering the observations you insist on making—’

‘Can’t we leave it for tonight, Mr L?’ Charles’ tone was tired, but even-tempered and respectful.

‘We can only leave it if you abandon your ridiculous intentions. I should like to be assured that that is what you are now proposing.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘In that case I want to inform you again that your intentions are nothing but a ridiculous fit of crankiness. I’ve listened to your maunderings about wanting your life to be useful. Herbert never maundered as crankily as that, to do him justice, which shows what you’ve come down to. I should like to know why you consider it’s specially incumbent on you to decide in what particular fashion your life ought to be useful.’

‘I’ve told you, I shouldn’t be on terms with myself—’

‘Stuff and nonsense. Why are you specially competent to decide that one man’s life is useful and another’s isn’t? Was my father’s life useful? Is my brother Philip’s? Is John’s [the butler’s]? I suppose that I’m expected to believe that my brother Philip’s life isn’t as useful as any twopenny ha’penny practitioner’s.’

Charles stayed silent. Mr March flapped the arms of his dressing-gown and his eyes were furious in their white surround.

‘Is that what I am expected to believe?’ he cried.

‘I don’t expect you to believe it for yourself, Mr L,’ said Charles with restraint. ‘I don’t expect you to believe it for Uncle Philip. All I want you to accept is that it does happen to be true for me.’

‘All I want you to accept,’ shouted Mr March, ‘is that it is a piece of pernicious cranky nonsense.’

The furore in the room made it hard to stay still. Yet it was true that Mr March could not credit that a balanced man should want to go to extravagant lengths to feel that his life was useful. He could not begin to understand the sense of social guilt, the sick conscience, which were real in Charles. To Mr March, who by temperament accepted life as it was, who was solid in the rich man’s life of a former day, such a reason seemed just perverse. He could not believe that his son’s temperament was at this point radically different from his own.

Without warning he began a new attack — from Charles’ expression new to him, not only new but beyond comparison more offensive.

‘I’ve been considering the origin of this pernicious nonsense,’ said Mr March. His tone had suddenly dropped, not to a conversational level, but to something lower, like a hard whisper. It was a tone completely unexpected, coming from him, and the effect was jarring, almost sinister.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to be persuaded that you came to these ridiculous conclusions by yourself.’

‘What do you mean to suggest?’

For the first time, Charles had raised his voice. Mr March kept his low.

‘I have been considering how many of these conclusions can be attributed to another person.’

‘Who would that be?’ Charles burst out.

‘My guest of last summer. Ann Simon.’

Mr March had not seen her since Haslingfield. Charles had told him nothing of their meetings: her name had been mentioned very seldom. Yet all of a sudden Mr March showed that he had been thinking of her with suspicion, with an elaborate, harsh, and jealous suspicion.

‘Is she or is she not,’ Mr March said, in a grating, obsessed tone, ‘the daughter of a practitioner herself?’

‘Of course she is.’

‘Is she or is she not the kind of young woman who would encourage a man to go in for highfalutin nonsense?’

‘Don’t you think this had better stop straight away?’ Charles said.

‘Has she or has she not attempted to seduce you into adopting her own pestilential opinions?’

White with anger, Charles stood up, and went towards the door. For the first time that night, Mr March addressed a remark to me:

‘Isn’t this young woman set on making my son what she’d have the insolence to call a useful member of society?’

I did not reply, and in an instant Mr March was asking another obsessed question at Charles’ back.

‘How many times have you seen her since she visited my house?’

Charles turned round. Trying to command himself, he said, with dignity, with something like affection: ‘It will be worse if we don’t leave it, don’t you see?’

‘How many times,’ cried Mr March, ‘have you seen her this last week?’

Charles looked at him, and to my astonishment Mr March said nothing more, did not wait for an answer, but rushed out of the room, his slippers scuffling.

The next day, however, Mr March repeated the questions again. Charles became enraged. At last his control broke down. He said curtly that there was no point in talking further. Without an explanation or excuse, he went out of the house.

When Charles had left, Mr March was subdued for a few hours. He did not know where his son had gone. His fury returned and he vented it on Katherine. ‘Why hasn’t Ann Simon been invited to my house?’ he burst into the drawing-room shouting. ‘I hold you responsible for not inviting her. If she had visited my house, I could have stopped this foolery before it showed signs of danger. I tell you, I insist on Ann Simon being invited here at once. I insist on seeing her before the weekend.’

Katherine invited her, but had to report to Mr March that Ann replied she was busy every day that week and could not come. Mr March did not say another angry word to Katherine. His silence was sombre and brooding.

17: A Reason for Escape

For forty-eight hours after he left Bryanston Square, no one knew where Charles was. Katherine was distracted with anxiety; on the second afternoon, Ann rang me up and asked if I could tell her anything. There had not been a silence between them before.

He came to my rooms that night. I had taken a brief home from chambers and was still working on it at ten o’clock. I had not heard him on the stairs, and the first I knew was that he stood inside the room, the shoulders of his coat glistening from the rain.

‘May I sleep on your sofa tonight?’ he asked. He was tired, he wanted the question to be accepted as casually as he tried to ask it. In order to prevent any talk of himself, he asked what I was doing, picked up the brief and read it with his intense and penetrating attention. He had begun to read before he threw off his overcoat; he stood on the carpet where, only a month before, I had seen him sit at Ann’s feet by the fire.

‘What line are you taking?’ he asked. ‘Have you got anything written down?’

I gave him my sketch of the case. He read it, still with abnormal concentration. He looked at me, his eyes bright with a smile both contemptuous and resentful.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You ought to win it that way. Unless you show more than usual incompetence when you get on your feet. But you oughtn’t to be satisfied with the case you’ve made, don’t you realize that? I should say you’re doing it slightly better than the average young counsel at your stage. Do you think that’s fair? I know you’re cleverer than this attempt suggests. But I sometimes wonder whether you’ll ever convey to the people in authority how clever you really are. You’re missing the chance to make this case slightly more impressive than your previous ones, don’t you admit it? If you just look here, you’ll see—’

He set to work upon my draft. Impatiently, but with extreme thoroughness and accuracy, he reshaped it; he altered the form, pared down the argument in the middle, brought in the details so that the line of the case stood out from beginning to end. It was criticism that was more than criticism, it was a re-creation of the case. He did it so brutally that it was not easy to endure.

I tried to shut out pique and vanity. I thought how strange it was that, at this crisis of his conflict with his father, in which they were quarrelling over his new profession, he could immerse himself in the problems of the one he had deliberately thrown away. He would never go back; he was determined to find his own salvation; yet was there perhaps the residue of a wish that he could return to the time before the break was made?

‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘that’s slightly less meaningless. It’s not specially elegant — but it will do you a bit less harm than your first draft would have done, don’t you admit that?’

It was nearly midnight, and neither of us had eaten for a long time. I took him to a dingy café close by. Charles looked at the window, steamy in the cold, wet night, smelt the frying onions, heard the rattle of dominoes in the inside room. ‘Do you often come here?’ he asked, but he saw, from the way the proprietor spoke to me, and the nods I exchanged, what the answer was. This was a side of my life he scarcely knew — the back streets, the cheap cafés, the ramshackle poverty, which I still took for granted.

We sat in an alcove, eating our plates of sausage and mash. Charles said: ‘You haven’t many ties, have you?’

‘I’ve got those I make myself,’ I said.

‘They’re not so intolerable,’ said Charles. ‘You’re lucky. You’ve been so much more alone than I ever have. You’ve had such incomparably greater privacy. Most of the things you’ve done have affected no one but yourself. I tell you, Lewis, you’re lucky.’

His eyes were gleaming.

‘They think I’m irresponsible to have gone off like this. They’re right. And they think I’m naturally not an irresponsible person. It might be better if I were. Can’t they imagine how anyone comes to a point where he wants to throw off every scrap of responsibility — and just go where no one knows him? Can’t they imagine how one’s aching to hide somewhere where no one notices anything one does?’

‘That’s why,’ he said, ‘you’re lucky to have no ties.’

He could not break, he was telling me, from his: for a night or two he had escaped, behaved completely out of character, shown no consideration or feeling or even manners: but he was drawn back to the conflict of his home. For a night or two he had escaped from the attempts to confine him, not only his father’s but also Ann’s. He was drawn back. But, sitting in the alcove of the smoky café, his face pale against the tarnished purple plush, his eyes brilliant with lack of sleep, Charles talked little of his father or Ann. He was unassuageably angry with himself. Why had he behaved in this fashion? — without dignity, without courage, without warmth. He could not explain it. He felt, not only self-despising, but mystified.

He talked of himself, but he said nothing I had not heard before. He went over the arguments for the way he had chosen. He was exhausted, unhappy, nothing he said could satisfy him. We walked the streets in the cold rain, it was late before we went to bed, but he had not reached any kind of release.

In the morning, grey and dark, we sat over our breakfast. He had been dreaming, he said, and he looked absent, as though still preoccupied and weighed down by his dream. Suddenly he rose, went to my desk and took hold of the brief on which we had worked the night before. He turned to me, his lips pulled sideways in a smile, and said: ‘I was unpleasant about this yesterday.’ It was not an apology. ‘You know what it is not to be able to stop being cruel. One hates it but goes on.’

At that moment we both knew, without another word, why he had escaped. He had not really escaped from the conflict: he had escaped from what he might do within it.

He knew — it was a link between us, for I also knew — what it was like to be cruel. To be impelled to be cruel, and to enjoy it. Other young men could let it ride, could take themselves for granted, but not he. He could not accept it as part of himself. It had to be watched and guarded against. With the force, freshness, and hope of which he was capable, he longed to put it aside, to be kind and selfless as he believed he could be kind and selfless. When he spoke of wanting to lead a ‘useful’ life, he really meant something stronger; but he was still young enough, and so were the rest of us, to be inhibited and prudish about the words we used. He said ‘useful’; but what he really meant was ‘good’. When Ann fought shy of my questions about what he hoped for, we both had an idea: he wanted to lead a good life, that was all.

I sometimes thought it was those who were tempted to be cruel who most wanted to be good.

Charles wanted to dull his sadic edge. He knew the glitter which radiated from him in a fit of malice. He was willing to become dull, humdrum, pedestrian, in order not to feel that special exhilaration of the nerves. For long periods he succeeded. By the time of that quarrel, he was gentler than when I first knew him. But he could not trust himself. To others the edge, the cruel glitter, might seem dead, but he had to live with his own nature.

So he was frightened of his conflict with his father. He must be free, he must find his own way, he must fulfil his love for Ann; but he needed desperately that he should prevail without trouble, without the harsh excitement that he could feel latent in his own heart. Neither Ann nor his father must suffer through him.

In the grey bleak light of that winter morning, he stood, still heavy from his dream, and knew why he had run away. Yet he believed that he could keep them safe. Those fits of temptation seemed like a visitor to his true self. They faded before the steady warmth and strength which ran more richly in him than in most men. With all the reassurance of that warmth and strength, he believed that he could keep them safe.

‘I shall go to stay with Francis for a few days,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll come back to Mr L’s. I’ll let them know today, of course. It’s monstrous to have given them this absurd piece of worry.’

18: Mr March Asks a Question

As soon as Mr March heard from his son, he insisted once more that Katherine should invite Ann to the house. Again Ann refused. Katherine was frightened to bring the reply to Mr March, but he received it without expression.

Hearing what had happened, I met Ann and told her it was a mistake to have declined the invitation. We were sitting in a Soho pub. Her eyes were sparkling, as though she were laughing it off.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

She spoke so lightly that I went on without concealing anything: I said that Mr March suspected her influence, and that for all their sakes she ought to calm him down.

Then I realized that I had completely misread her. It was anger that made her eyes bright; she was not only indignant, but outraged.

‘I’m very glad that I didn’t go,’ she said.

‘It will make things worse.’

‘No,’ she said with fierceness. ‘He’s got to see that Charles has decided for himself.’

‘He’ll never believe it,’ I told her.

‘I can’t help that.’

‘Can’t you try?’

‘No.’ Her tone was dismissive and hard. ‘I should have thought you knew that Charles had made his choice. I should have thought you knew that it was right for him.’

‘I’m not asking you to make me realize it—’ I began.

‘Any sane father would realize it too. If Mr March insists on making a nuisance of himself, I can’t help it.’

She added that she had rung up Charles to ask whether she might refuse the invitation — and he had said yes. The pleasure, the submissive pleasure, with which she spoke of asking Charles’ permission glowed against the hardness she had just shown about Mr March.

She had been angry with me also, for telling her what she already knew. But she was tired by the conflict over Charles; she found it a relief to make it up with me and talk about him. She told me something, more than either of them had done before, about their plans for marriage. It was still not settled. Recently, there had been a reason for delay, with Charles deciding on his career; but Ann told me that, months before, he had been pressing her to marry him. I did not doubt her for a second, but it puzzled me. The delay had been on her side. Yet she returned his passion. That night, in the middle of trouble, she spoke like an adoring woman who might be abandoned by her lover.

‘I wish it were all over,’ she said to me. ‘I wish he and I were together by ourselves.’

Her face was strained. It occurred to me that hers was the kind of strength which would snap rather than give way. To divert her, I arranged to take her to a concert the following night.

When I spoke to Katherine, in order to find out whether Mr March had taken any more steps, I mentioned that Ann was only putting a face on things by act of will.

Katherine said impatiently: ‘I often wish Charles had found someone a bit more ordinary.’

As Ann and I walked to our seats at the Queen’s Hall next evening, I noticed how many men’s eyes were drawn to her. When the first piece had started and I was composing myself, because the music meant nothing to me, for two hours of day-dreaming, I looked at her: she was wearing a new red evening frock, the skin of her throat was white, she had closed her eyes as she had done in the sun at Haslingfield.

In the interval, we moved down the aisle on our way out. Suddenly, with a start of astonishment and alarm, I saw Mr March coming towards us. Ann saw him at the same instant. Neither of us had any doubt that he had followed her there to force this meeting. All we could do was walk on. As I waited for the moment of meeting, I was thinking ‘how did he learn we were here?’ The question nagged at me, meaninglessly important, fretting with anxiety, ‘how did he learn we were here?’

Mr March stood in our way. He looked at Ann, and said good evening to us both. Then, addressing himself entirely to Ann, he said without any explanation: ‘I’m glad to see you here tonight. I haven’t had the pleasure of your company since you graced my establishment in the country. My children, for some reason best known to themselves, have deprived me of the opportunity of renewing our acquaintance.’

‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t come this week, Mr March. Katherine asked me,’ said Ann.

‘It was at my special request that my daughter asked you. I see no reason why my house should not claim an occasional evening of your time,’ said Mr March. From the first word his manner reminded me of his reception of her at Haslingfield: except that now he made more demands on her. ‘I recall that shortly after our first acquaintance we had an unfortunate difference of opinion upon the future of the world. I should consider the views you expressed even more pernicious if they prevented you from coming to my house again.’

Ann made a polite mutter.

‘I am expecting you to come tonight,’ said Mr March. ‘I expect you both to give me the pleasure of your company when these performers have finished. I don’t think you can refuse to call in at my house for an hour or so.’

Ann’s expression stayed open and steady: but her eyes looked childishly young, just as I had seen others’ at a sudden shock.

‘I shall have the pleasure of escorting you,’ said Mr March. For the first time, he turned to me: ‘Lewis, I rely on you to see that when the performers have exhausted themselves you both find your way towards my car.’

Ann sat by my side through the rest of the concert without any restless tic at all, as though keeping herself deliberately still.

The drive to Bryanston Square was quiet. I sat in front and only once or twice heard any words pass between the two behind. Even when he did speak, Mr March’s voice was unusually low. It was still not his full voice that he used in giving orders to the butler, as soon as we entered the house.

‘Tell my daughter to join us in my study. See that something to eat and drink is provided for my guests. Tell Taylor he is to wait with the car to take Miss Simon home.’ He took Ann’s arm, eagerly, perhaps roughly, and led her across the hall.

His study was the darkest room in the house, the wallpaper a deep brown, the bookshelves full of leather-bound collections that came down from his ancestors, together with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Jewish Encyclopaedia, and rows of works of reference. A bright fire was blazing, though the room still seemed cavernous. A tray of sandwiches and glasses was brought in after us, and Katherine followed. At the sight of her face, I knew the answer to the nagging question ‘how did he know where to find us?’ She must have let fall, after my conversation with her, that I was taking Ann to the concert. I felt an instant of irrelevant satisfaction, as one does when a name one has forgotten suddenly clicks back to mind.

‘I am not aware what refreshment you consider appropriate for this time of night,’ said Mr March to Ann, as he sat down in his armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace. ‘I hope you will ask for anything that may not be provided.’

Ann absently let him give her a brandy-and-soda, and sipped at it.

‘I want to ask you,’ said Mr March, ‘why my son is contemplating a completely unsuitable career.’

19: Father and Son

‘I want to ask you,’ said Mr March, ‘why my son is contemplating a completely unsuitable career.’

The firelight glowed on Ann’s face. She did not show any change of expression. Politely she answered:

‘I really don’t know why you’re asking me that.’

‘I’m asking you,’ said Mr March, ‘because there is no one else qualified to give an opinion.’

‘There is only one person who can give an opinion, you know,’ said Ann.

‘Who may that be?’

‘Why, Charles himself.’ She answered once more in a deferential tone, but Mr March’s voice was growing harsh as he said:

‘I do not consider that my son is responsible for his actions in this respect.’

‘I wish you’d believe that he’s entirely responsible.’

‘I acknowledge your remark,’ Mr March shot out furiously. ‘I repeat that he is not responsible for this preposterous nonsense. You regard me as being considerably blinder than I am. From the moment I heard of it, I knew that he was committing it at your instigation. You have forced him into it for reasons of your own.’

‘I assure you that isn’t true,’ said Ann. Mr March burst out again, but she went on, her manner still respectful, but with firmness and anger underneath: ‘Charles has discussed his future with me, I won’t pretend he hasn’t. I won’t pretend that I haven’t told him what I think. As a matter of fact I do believe that becoming a doctor is absolutely right for him. But the idea was entirely his own. Neither I nor anyone else has any influence over him when it comes to deciding his actions. As far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t choose to have it otherwise.’

She was sitting back in her chair, and the flickering of the bright fire threw shadows on her checks and heightened the moulding of the bones. As she replied, Mr March’s frown had darkened. He was maddened at not being able to upset her. Then he said: ‘You are much too modest. You are aware that you are an exceedingly attractive woman. I have no doubt that you have tested your power of twisting men round your little finger. I have no doubt that you are testing it on my son now. I can imagine that he is enough in your power to be willing to throw away all I had hoped for him.’

‘I can’t think you know him,’ said Ann.

‘I know,’ said Mr March, looking at her with an intense and bitter stare, ‘that many men would do the same. They would do any nonsense you might want them to.’

‘I shouldn’t have any use for a man who did what I told him,’ she said.

‘Then you have no use for my son?’ shouted Mr March, in a tone that was suddenly triumphant and full of hope.

‘He would never do what I told him.’

‘What is your attitude towards him?’

‘I love him,’ she said.

Mr March groaned.

Ann had spoken straight out, almost roughly, as though it was something that had to be settled once for all. Perhaps she was provoked, because she could feel him torn by a double jealousy.

She was taking away his son, destroying all his hopes: this was the loss which kept biting into his thoughts. But there was another. He was jealous of his son for winning Ann. He too had been attracted by her. That had been evident under the gallantry he showed her at Haslingfield. There was nothing strange about it. Mr March was still a vigorous man. He could imagine by instinct exactly what his son felt for her, down to the deep level where passion and emotion are one. He could imagine it because, with the slightest turn of opportunity, he could have felt it so himself.

So Mr March groaned, as though it were a physical shock.

‘If that is true,’ he said, bringing himself back to the other loss, ‘I find it even more astonishing that you express approval of his absurd intention. Even though you refuse to accept responsibility for it, from what you have just said, I am more certain than ever that the responsibility is yours, and yours alone.’

‘I was glad when he decided to become a doctor, of course I was. He knew I should be glad. That is all,’ she said.

‘Glad? Glad? What justification have you for feeling glad except that you are responsible for it yourself? Are you incapable of realizing that he is ruining any reasonable prospects he might have had? Even if he goes through with this absurd intention—’

‘He will go through with it.’ For the first time she interrupted him.

‘What then? You think my son ought to be satisfied to be a mediocre practitioner?’

‘He’ll be happier about himself,’ said Ann.

There was a silence. A lull came over them. Katherine and I said a few words: Ann even talked of the music she had heard. Then Mr March began to start on his accusations again. A few minutes later, we heard a noise in the hall. As we listened, the clock on the mantelpiece struck midnight. The door opened, and Charles came into the room.

‘I was given no warning to expect you back,’ said Mr March.

‘I only decided to come a couple of hours ago,’ said Charles.

He looked at Katherine, and I guessed that she had let him know, as soon as she realized what her gaffe had meant.

Charles drew up a chair by the side of Ann’s.

Mr March’s expression was harsh, sombre, and guilty. He said: ‘I met your friend Ann Simon being escorted by Lewis Eliot to the Queen’s Hall. A remarkably undistinguished evening the performers entertained us with, by the way. So I invited them here for refreshments, before they went to their respective homes.’

‘I see,’ said Charles.

Mr March paused, then said: ‘I have taken the opportunity to give Ann Simon my views on your present intentions. I have also asked her for an explanation as to why you have conceived such a ridiculous project.’

‘I should have preferred you to do that in front of me,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to listen to criticisms from my son upon my behaviour in my own house,’ said Mr March.

‘I shall make them,’ said Charles, ‘if you insist on intruding on my privacy. Don’t you see that this is an intolerable intrusion, don’t you see that?’

‘Your privacy? Do you expect me to accept that your ruining your life is simply a private concern of your own?’

‘Yes,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to tolerate it in any circumstances,’ Mr March said. ‘Particularly when you’re not acting as a free agent, and are simply letting this young woman gratify some of her misguided tastes.’

‘You must leave her out of it.’

‘I’ve told Mr March,’ said Ann, ‘that I’m very glad about your decision. But I’ve told him that I had nothing to do with your making it, and couldn’t have had.’

‘I shall leave her out of this matter when I have any reason to believe that she’s not the source and origin of it all. If she enjoys wearing the trousers, she’s got to be prepared to answer for the results.’

Up to that instant, Charles’ manner had been stern without relief, and his voice hard and constrained. Suddenly he broke for a second into a singular smile. It was a smile partly sarcastic, partly amused: it was edged by the nearness of Ann, by his sense of the absurd, as though, after Mr March’s last remark, nothing could be so absurd again. Then the argument went on.

With their usual repetitiveness they went over the practical reasons time and time again: underneath one heard the assertion of Mr March’s power, the claims of his affection, the anguish of his jealousies, the passion of his hopes, and in Charles, his claustrophobic desire to be free, his longing for release in love with Ann, his search for the good, his untameable impulse to find his own way, whatever its cost to others and himself. At least twice Charles was on the point of an outburst, such as he had struggled against. He did not let it come to light; he had mastered himself enough for that.

At half past one, Mr March sent Katherine to bed, and a little later made a last appeal.

‘I have not alluded to the opinion of the family,’ he said.

‘You know they could not even begin to count,’ said Charles.

‘I must remind you that they will occupy a place in my regard as long as I live,’ said Mr March. ‘But I was aware you allowed yourself to entertain no feeling for them. You did not leave me any illusions on the point when you made known your intention not to continue for the time being at the Bar.’

He was talking more quietly and affectionately than at any time that night.

‘You even had the civility to say,’ Mr March went on, ‘that you would pay considerably more attention to my wishes than to theirs. You expressed yourself as having some concern about me.’

‘I meant it,’ said Charles.

‘You did not pretend that your actions had no effect on my happiness.’

‘No.’

‘I should like to inform you that if you carry out your present intention, it will have a considerable effect on my happiness.’

Charles looked at Ann, and then at his father.

‘I wish it were not so,’ said Charles. ‘But I can’t alter my mind.’

‘You realize what it means for me?’

‘I’m afraid I do,’ said Charles.

Until that moment they might have been repeating their quarrel on the first Friday night I attended, the quarrel to which Mr March had just referred. All of a sudden it took a different turn. Immediately he heard Charles’ answer, Mr March got up from his chair. He said:

‘Then I must use my own means.’

He said goodbye to Ann with his old courtesy, and even now there was a spark of the gallant in it. He asked me to see her into the car, and retired to his study with Charles. The door closed behind them.

As Ann got ready to go, I saw that she was radiant, full of joy. I told her that I would stay in case Charles wanted someone to talk to. She pressed my hand and said: ‘And thank you for taking me to the concert. You can see what being kind lets you in for, can’t you?’

She was happy beyond caring. The car was ready, and she walked down the steps, straight-backed, not hurrying. I switched on the lights in the drawing-room. It was brilliant after the dark study. The fire had gone out hours ago, and there was nothing but ashes in the grate. The cold, the bright light, made me shiver. I tried to read. Once, perhaps twice, I heard through the walls a voice raised in anger.

An hour passed before Charles entered. He asked me for a cigarette, and had almost smoked it through before he spoke again. Then he said, in a level, neutral tone: ‘He’s revoked his promise to make me independent.’

He went on: ‘I’ve told you before, he was going to make over some money to me when I was twenty-five. He’s just admitted that it has always been his intention.’

I asked what Mr March had said. He had repeated, Charles replied, that up to that night he had been arranging to transfer a substantial sum to Charles on his twenty-fifth birthday — something like £40,000. He had now altered his mind. He was prepared to continue paying Charles his allowance. But he was determined to make no irrevocable gift.

‘I said that I might want to get married soon,’ said Charles. ‘He replied that he could not let that influence his judgement. He was not going to make me independent while I insisted on going in for misguided fooleries.’

The lines in Charles’ face were cut deep.

‘I can understand,’ he said, ‘that he wants me to lead the life he’s imagined for me. I know I must be a desperate disappointment. You know, don’t you, that for a long time I’ve tried to soften it as much as I possibly could? You do know that? But I tell you, I shan’t find this easy to accept.’

I felt a sense of danger which I could not have explained. I could not even have said which of them I was frightened for.

Charles asked me: ‘Do you think he wants to stop me marrying?’

I hesitated.

‘Do you think he wants to stop me marrying Ann?’

‘He wouldn’t have chosen her for you,’ I said, after a pause. His insight was too keen for him not to have seen both of Mr March’s jealousies: but they were best left unspoken.

‘What shall you do?’ I said.

Suddenly his heaviness and anger dropped away, and he gave a smile.

‘What do you think I shall do? Do you think I could stop now?’