The Conscience of the Rich

28: Seventieth Birthday

Mr March’s seventieth birthday was due in the May of 1936, and for weeks beforehand he had been calling on his younger relatives and friends, insisting that they keep the night of the twenty-second free. It was the only birthday he had celebrated since he was a child; usually he would not have the day so much as mentioned. But some caprice made him want everyone to realize that he was seventy. Many of the very young had not seen him as extravagant as this.

They had heard the family legends of Uncle Leonard, but they had not often been inside his house, except for the formal Friday nights. Since the marriages of Katherine and Charles five years before, he had given up entertaining the young.

For his seventieth birthday party, we were each invited, not only by a call from Mr March in person, but also by a long letter in his own hand. Presents were prohibited with violence. None of us knew how large the dinner was to be until we arrived at Bryanston Square; the house was brighter than I ever remembered it, lights streaming on to the square, cocktails, which Mr March had not allowed there before, being drunk in the drawing-room. Mr March was moving from one young relative to another, his coat-tails flapping behind him. Wherever he went one heard noise and laughter.

As we waited for dinner, there were about fifty people standing in the room. None of Mr March’s contemporaries was there; by another caprice of Mr March’s, none of them had been invited. Perhaps, I thought, he did not want to be reminded that his generation of Marches was dying.

Since Charles married, Herbert and his wife had both died, and Caroline’s husband. Hannah was still alive, but bed-ridden. Of Mr March’s contemporaries, only Philip and Caroline were left at Friday nights.

At the birthday party, Margaret March and I seemed to be the oldest of the guests, and we were just over thirty. The majority of them were Mr March’s youngest nephews and nieces and second cousins. To make up the number which he had set himself, Mr March had asked several to bring their young men and women.

Mr March walked among them, cordial to everyone, lingering once or twice appreciatively by the prettier girls. His spirits were not damped by Katherine’s absence; she had had to cry off at a few hours’ notice, since one of her children had measles. ‘I should see no reason to anticipate serious consequences at this stage,’ said Mr March, ‘if it were not for the practitioners whom they insist on employing. They are reported to be competent, but I refuse to accept responsibility for their performances. I thought it wise to send my daughter an account of their careers, so far as I could discover them from the professional records, and draw special attention to those features I did not consider up to snuff.’

He added: ‘I have to admit that I have not yet discovered a practitioner whose record appeared to me to be up to snuff in all respects.’

He returned to a knot of nephews and nieces in order to answer their chaff about presents. Why had he refused to allow us to give him any? Because the material objects offered on these occasions were always of singular uselessness. Books? All the books approved of by young persons of cultivated taste produce nothing but the deepest depression. Had he really received no presents from anyone? ‘Well,’ said Mr March, ‘my second-cousin-once-removed Harry Stein didn’t obey my instructions. He ignored the hint and sent me a box of cigars. If the fellow wants to be civil, I suppose I can’t deprive him of the pleasure.’

Instead of receiving presents on his birthday, Mr March had decided to give some. Someone asked him whether this was true, and he said: ‘I refuse either to deny or confirm.’ Under pressure, he admitted that ‘the juvenile members of the family had received a contribution towards their confectionery’ that morning. But he became his most secretive when people wanted him to say exactly what he had given, and to how many. It came out later that each person under twenty-one in the March family, that is the March family in its widest sense, had found waiting for them at breakfast that morning a cheque for ‘Seventy Pounds Exactly’.

Mr March stood in his drawing-room, retorted to the questions of his nieces, sent the footmen hurrying about the bright room with trays of cocktails, sipped a glass of sherry. As I watched him, I thought how well preserved he still looked. His moustache had whitened in the last few years, the wings of hair above his ears were scantier and greyer, the veins on his temples stood out; but his step, his brusque, quick, clumsy movements, the resonance of his laughter, were still a robust man’s.

He seemed gayer than I had seen him for a long time. Even the entrance of Ann did not seem to produce any strain. It was a long time since she had been inside his home. There had been no break, but since Mr March made his last unconceding answer to Charles before their marriage, she had without a word spoken slipped away. That night, as she went up to shake hands with Mr March, he greeted her in a curt, matter-of-fact fashion. His manner seemed to suggest, not that they only met on the most formal occasions within the March family life, but simply that there was no need of explanations between them. He asked Margaret March to introduce her to a group in the corner of the room, and despatched a footman after her.

He kept Charles by him a little longer, and teased him affectionately and without rancour. ‘May I enquire about the vital statistics of Pimlico and similar unsalubrious neighbourhoods?’

‘They’re not much affected yet,’ said Charles, also with good humour.

‘I refuse to take responsibility for any deterioration,’ said Mr March.

‘Well, that will be bad for everyone’s morale, won’t it, Mr L?’ Charles replied.

Mr March chuckled. Just listening to them, no one would have guessed their story. Then Mr March moved off to meet Caroline’s grandchildren.

For a second Charles was left alone, until two cousins joined him. He stood there, in the centre of his father’s drawing-room, looking a little older than his age: his forehead had lined, but his expression was keen, healthy, and settled: his face had taken on the shape it would wear until he was old.

His father’s reference to ‘Pimlico and similar unsalubrious neighbourhoods’ meant that, not long after he graduated as a doctor, Charles had bought a partnership in a practice down by the river. Whether he bought it with Ann’s money, none of us knew. It was certain that Mr March had made no contribution.

Charles himself was lighting a cigarette for a girl and as he straightened himself he looked at Ann. I followed his eyes. She had altered less than most of us; she had kept her open, youthful good looks. She was listening to a young man with the attention, gentle, friendly, and positive, that I remembered so well. As he watched, there was a spark in Charles’ eye. Their love had stayed not only strong but brilliant. For them both, except that they had still had no child, it had turned out the best of marriages.

There were two tables laid in the dining-room, and the butler went to Charles and told him that he and Ann were expected to preside at the smaller. Mr March was left free to have two bright, pert, pretty nieces sitting one on each hand. Between the two tables stood four standard lamps, brought in for the occasion; Mr March caused a commotion by demanding that two of them be removed, as soon as we had sat down. ‘This room has been appallingly dark during my occupancy of thirty-eight years,’ he said loudly. ‘It was even darker in my uncle Francis’ time. Now the first time it’s ever been properly lit, the confounded lights are arranged so as to obscure my view of half my guests.’

The lights were removed. Mr March surveyed the whole party with a satisfied, possessive, and triumphant smile. There were fifty-seven people in the room. Mr March announced, and again over the fish, that he had reserved one and a half rows of the stalls at ‘some theatre whose name you will be informed of in due course’.

Margaret teased him about this sudden burst of secrecy: she produced the theory that he refused to go to the sort of play admired by his children’s ‘intellectual friends’, and so was luring us somewhere of his own choice.

‘No! No!’ said Mr March. Other members of the family joined in, shouting and laughing. Mr March’s voice rose above them.

‘No! No! My motives are being misinterpreted. But I will say this, if any of you want to be depressed tonight, you’d better stay in the house and read one of the books approved of by your literary friends. Not that I don’t admire ’em—’ he said to me, ‘but now I’m getting old I find I don’t want to be reminded of the unpleasant circumstances which afflicted me when I was young.’

‘So that you find that you worry less than you used to, do you?’ said one of the bright, pretty nieces.

Several people in the know were chuckling, for the night’s celebration had been arranged with an expenditure of anxiety unusual even for Mr March.

‘I worry dreadfully,’ said Mr March complacently. ‘I’ve never known anyone worry more dreadfully than I do.’

‘Not so badly as you used to, though,’ said Margaret.

‘Worse. Much worse,’ said Mr March. ‘I’ve learnt to control myself, that’s all.’

He chuckled, as loudly as anyone. ‘I’ve also learned to avoid occasions that I dislike. The only advantage of getting old,’ said Mr March, ‘is that you’re not faced by so many occasions that you’re bound to dislike, if you’re too shy and diffident a person.

‘There are a corresponding number of disadvantages, of course,’ Mr March went on. ‘I shall shortly have to abandon my club because the people I know are dropping off one by one, and it’s an unnecessary strain on the memory to burden yourself with new faces — a very ugly face, by the way, that fellow possesses that my brother Philip has just got into the club. It’s an unnecessary strain to burden yourself with new faces for a period of time that can’t be worth the effort. It’s curious also how soon people are forgotten in the club when they’re dead. When I die they’ll discontinue my special brand of tea-buns next day.’

For a few moments the reflection sobered him. Before the end of the meal, he was enjoying himself again. On the way to the play, which turned out to be a revival of one of Lonsdale’s, he enjoyed marshalling the cars, re-collecting the party on the steps of the theatre, taking the middle seat of the second row of the stalls. In the first interval he came out with Margaret March, and said with the utmost gratification: ‘I call it a very mediocre play.’

Margaret protested, but Mr March overbore her in his most sincere and genial manner: ‘It is extremely mediocre.’ He turned to me thoughtfully. ‘I believe you could write a play not much worse than that.’

While he was talking, Margaret noticed her Aunt Caroline coming down from the circle by herself. We saw the gleam of her lorgnon as she sighted her brother. She had become enormously fat, and her flesh shook as she made her way down.

‘I heard from a good many quarters,’ she said to Mr March, ‘that you were giving yourself a spree tonight. So I decided to come and inspect you.’

She could not resist the time-honoured joke about his meanness: was that why he had not invited the older Marches? Mr March grinned, but his manner was defensive.

She protruded a large silver ear-trumpet at him as he replied.

‘Birthday parties have always been understood to come into a special category,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had any of you to my house on my birthday since I was married — except Hannah, and, needless to say, she invited herself.’

Just before we returned to our seats, Caroline said casually in her loud voice: ‘By the way, I had dinner with Philip. The poor fellow would have been here with me, but he’s afraid he’s got his gout coming on. He gave me a message for you. He said that, in case I missed you, you’d find the same message waiting at your house.’

As she rummaged in her handbag for an envelope, she did not seem specially interested, nor Mr March specially concerned. But, as he read the note, his face darkened with anxiety, and he said to his sister:

‘I shall need your company in the next interval.’

Mr March was on his feet in the stalls as the curtain came down at the end of the second act. He met his sister, and I watched them walk back and forth on the far side of the foyer. She walked slowly, with her ponderous tread, and her silver trumpet flew to and from her ear.

To my surprise, Mr March beckoned me to them. Their conversation had looked comic from a distance: at close quarters there was nothing comic in Mr March’s expression.

‘I wanted to ask you, Lewis, whether you have any recent knowledge of the activities of my daughter’s brother-in-law? I mean the fellow Herbert Getliffe.’

The question was unexpected: Mr March asked it in a flat and heavy tone.

‘No, I’ve not seen much of him lately,’ I said. ‘I’ve dined with him once or twice, but that’s all.’

‘You can’t give us any information upon how he can be affecting the position of my brother Philip?’

I was astonished. I said that I could not imagine it.

‘So far as I can infer from the only information I possess,’ said Mr March, ‘this preposterous situation is connected with certain gossip which was circulating at the time of my daughter’s marriage. You may remember that there was a certain amount of gossip at that time.’

I nodded. ‘But that was five years ago.’

‘I do not pretend to any greater enlightenment than you do. My brother has however sent a note asking for my advice, which is an entirely unprecedented occurrence. I have been trying to discover the reason for this occurrence from my sister, but she has not proved illuminating.’

Caroline caught this last sentence.

‘I still think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,’ she boomed.

‘You said that twice about my son,’ said Mr March. He was silent for a moment, then turned to me with a sad, friendly, and trusting smile. ‘I rely on you for the discretion and kindness you have always shown towards my family.’

The second bell sounded, and Mr March began to walk into the theatre. He said to me:

‘I should be obliged if you would find my son’s wife. I should like a word with her.’

I brought Ann to him in the aisle of the stalls. Without any explanation, he asked her: ‘Do you still see Ronald Porson?’

‘Do you know him?’ she asked.

‘Do you still see him?’

‘Very occasionally.’

He began to ask her another question, something about Ronald Porson and Getliffe, in a voice which had become low but intensely angry. As he did so, the lights of the theatre were dimming, and Ann left to find her seat.

After the play was over, when we stood outside the theatre, Mr March was no calmer. He did not attempt to ask more questions, he just let his temper go. It was raining, the fleet of cars in which his party had arrived could not get round to the front of the theatre. Mr March watched car after car drive up to the pavement, and his temper grew worse.

‘In former days,’ he complained, ‘there wasn’t this congestion of owner-drivers from the suburbs. Owner-drivers are making the town intolerable for genuine inhabitants. A genuine inhabitant used to be able to reckon on returning to his house within a quarter of an hour of being disgorged from any suitable place of entertainment.’

The cars did not arrive: Mr March borrowed an umbrella from the commissionaire and went out into the middle of the road. The lights of taxis, golden bars on the wet asphalt, lit him up as he looked furiously round. Drivers honked at him as he stamped in front of them back to the theatre steps.

‘It’s intolerable,’ he cried. ‘They’re taking my night’s rest away from me now. They’re changing everything under my feet, and I’m too old to change my ways. I suppose my existence has been prolonged unnecessarily already. Though Lionel Hart didn’t think so, when he had a blood transfusion on his seventy-eighth birthday. They’re changing everything under my feet.’ He thudded the umbrella point against the pavement. ‘I remarked at dinner-time, when I was under the illusion that I had completed seventy years without disaster, about not wanting to be reminded of the unpleasant circumstances which afflicted me when I was young. But when you’re young you don’t lose your sleep at night on account of your attachments. When you begin to do that, it makes you realize that you have lived too long.’

29: Reassurance

The morning after his birthday party, Mr March rang me up: would I be good enough to spare him an hour of my time, as soon as I could arrange it without prejudice to my duties? I went round to Bryanston Square immediately, and was taken into Mr March’s study. I had not entered that room since the night he interrogated Ann.

‘I appreciate your courtesy in visiting me without delay,’ said Mr March. His eyes were bloodshot and the skin under them had darkened in the last few hours. ‘I have to apologize, of course, for trespassing on your valuable time, but you are the only person whose opinion is of any appreciable value to me in the present regrettable circumstances. Owing to your acquaintance with the fellow Getliffe, and other factors which I need not specify.’

He had already been out to see Philip that morning; Philip was in bed and in pain, and had not been able to present all the facts. One thing, however, was clear to Mr March. Philip had now become certain about the nature of Herbert Getliffe’s transactions, some time before Katherine’s wedding. There was no doubt in Philip’s mind that Getliffe had, while giving legal advice to a ministry, acquired knowledge in advance of a government contract. Getliffe had known that the contract was going to the firm of Howard & Hazlehurst; his relations had duly bought large holdings. That had happened. On the main points Porson had been right, though he had muddled some of the details.

That story would not by itself have worried Mr March. It was a piece of sharp practice by a rising barrister, but it was seven years old. By this time the Marches had completely accepted Francis Getliffe. There were, however, other stories which worried Mr March much more.

The first was that ‘obnoxious propagandists’, as Mr March kept referring to them, were passing the word round that a similar leakage had just occurred, and that Getliffe and his friends were again involved. According to Sir Philip, this news was going round the lobbies and clubs; it was still secret but there was a threat that it would soon break.

The second story was that not only Getliffe and his friends were involved, but so were several junior ministers. Philip had been taken back into the government three years before, into the same parliamentary secretaryship he had held for a few months in 1929. On Friday nights he had loved gossiping like a man in office, mentioning his colleagues’ names. The ‘obnoxious propagandists’ were now mentioning some of those names, including that of Hawtin, one of the ablest youngish men in the government. They were being brought into the scandal. ‘It’s like another Marconi case,’ said Mr March, harking back to a time when he felt more at home.

Philip had told him that among the names being mentioned was Philip’s own.

Mr March was puzzled and distressed, more lost than angry. He would have liked to explode into rage, and dismiss the scandal as ‘mischievious nonsense invented by agitators for their own purposes’. He had begun so, that morning: but stopped suddenly when he found Sir Philip fretted and impatient.

‘I have never seen my brother Philip so much affected by any incident in his public life,’ said Mr March. ‘I was inclined at first to attribute his depressed state to his disease, but I was forced to realize that he is sick in mind apart from his physical discomfort. I had never realized that he was capable of being sick in mind. From the earliest time I can remember, I always envied him as not being vulnerable to the weaknesses that afflicted me.’

He was profoundly shaken at having to console Philip — Philip, whom throughout their lives he had thought self-sufficient. He went on: ‘I do not profess to understand why he should take this criminal nonsense so much to heart. I did not need to be assured by my eldest brother that he had not taken advantage of his official position. But he was sufficiently overwrought to insist on assuring me that he had completely given up any transactions of any kind whatsoever since he re-entered the government and that he had not made a single purchase of stock for the last twelve months.’

Philip had said that he did not know whether the stories of Herbert Getliffe’s recent coups were true or not. Mr March was mystified by these stories, and so was I. Was there anything in them?

It was in both our minds how Philip had taken action against Getliffe at the time of Katherine’s marriage.

I promised Mr March that I would try to find out what Getliffe had been up to. It was not such an easy job for me as it would have been once. Since my marriage four years before, I had left Getliffe’s chambers; I had given up legal practice and spent half my time teaching law at Francis Getliffe’s college and the other half in London as a consultant to a big firm.

I promised also that I would try to find out who was spreading the gossip, and why.

I began to realize that, of all Mr March’s anxieties, that was the deepest. From all he had picked up, the gossip had originated with people who were familiar with Getliffe and his circle. Perhaps they were familiar with Sir Philip and his colleagues too: that did not seem so clear. It sounded like Ronald Porson: yet the scandal had, according to Philip, been started by the extreme left. It was not just malicious gossip, it was no more nor less than a piece of politics, he said. From what Mr March had heard of Porson, that ruled him out.

Mr March concealed his thoughts from me: but after a time I had no doubt — he was dark with a suspiciousness that seemed quite unrealistic, with a fear that seemed on the edge of paranoia — that he was thinking of Ann.

It was this fear, I was sure next day, that drove him to see Charles.

I had promised to make enquiries about Getliffe within twenty-four hours and return to Bryanston Square for dinner on the night following; when I arrived, I found Mr March and Charles alone in the drawing-room. There was a silence as though neither had spoken for some minutes. Mr March roused himself, and said: ‘I asked my son to join us for dinner. As you see, he has found it possible to do so.’

Charles said: ‘It happens to be a good night for me, Mr L. My partner is always at home on Wednesdays.’

Mr March did not reply. Charles looked at me with a frown, enquiring and concerned. It was clear that Mr March had not yet spoken.

We went into the dining-room with little conversation. Charles made an effort to get Mr March talking, and himself told a story of Katherine: Mr March sat absently at the head of the table.

Suddenly, Mr March said: ‘Lewis, I should like to learn the results of your investigations.’

‘I’m afraid they haven’t got anywhere yet,’ I said. ‘Herbert Getliffe is out of London. He’ll be back early next week, and I’ve arranged to see him then. I’m also trying to see Porson on the same day.’

Mr March inclined his head.

‘I know that in the circumstances you will not permit any unnecessary delay.’ He turned to Charles. ‘You realize what I am referring to?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Charles.

‘It is desirable that I should enlighten you,’ said Mr March. ‘My brother Philip is being attacked by scurrilous gossip from various sources. This attack appears to be aimed at his personal honour and his public position. It is connected, in some way about which I am not in a position to give you precise details, with the speculations of my son-in-law Francis Getliffe’s brother. Anyone in my family will recollect a previous occasion on which that subject exercised a certain importance. My brother is being attacked for similar mispractices, though in his case they would be more reprehensible, since they would imply that he took advantage of his official position for these purposes.’

Mr March stopped, then asked in a loud harsh voice: ‘I wish to ask you, what do you know of these attacks?’

‘Nothing. Nothing whatever,’ said Charles. His tone was unresentful, almost amused, and utterly candid. ‘They sound very improbable.’

Mr March’s relief was manifest and radiant. Then his face darkened again.

‘I take it, your wife is still active politically?’

Charles looked surprised; it was years since they had argued over Ann’s beliefs: in those days, Mr March had spoken as though her politics were academic. Nevertheless Charles replied at once: ‘Yes, she is.’

‘I am very sorry to hear it.’

Mr March was looking absent and sombre again.

Charles said, in a considerate, respectful, but unyielding tone: ‘I ought to say that I think she’s doing good most of the time.’

By that year, men like Charles and Francis Getliffe and me had not much doubt about what was in store. It seemed to us that there was no choice except war with Hitler — or rather that any other choice was going to be worse than the war. That conviction was separating us from our elders, even those we liked, such as Mr March and Sir Philip.

In the struggle, which was growing bitter, we felt that Ann and her party were on our side. While Sir Philip went confidently about Whitehall and talked to the family on Friday nights as though their world were invulnerable, placid, and permanent. Both he and Mr March were men of judgement: they were more detached and realistic than most of their class: they were Jews. But they could not believe what was coming. To us, they seemed often not to care.

Mr March did not reply to Charles, but asked abruptly: ‘What does your wife know of these attacks?’

‘I should think as little as I do.’ Charles’ tone was once more open and candid, so candid that Mr March was entirely reassured.

Charles asked for the full story, and Mr March told it him: as he spoke, Mr March’s manner had become animated, but he finished: ‘I must impress on you, that my brother Philip takes this with the utmost seriousness. My first inclination was not to give it serious attention. But my brother’s demeanour made me adopt a different attitude.’

‘I don’t understand him,’ said Charles. ‘It wouldn’t be hard to make up a good many kinds of attack on Uncle Philip: but, if I’d been thinking of something improbable, I couldn’t have invented anything as improbable as this.’ He was speaking light-heartedly. He asked more questions about Getliffe, some of them sarcastic, so that Mr March chuckled. He went on: ‘About Uncle Philip — aren’t all people in public life absurdly sensitive to the slightest breath of criticism? Isn’t that the explanation? Don’t you really think that Uncle Philip sticks his Press cuttings into an album every morning before he gets up? If you are as interested as that in your public personality, it must be uncomfortable when people are blackguarding you — even on singularly fantastic grounds. It’s that kind of discomfort he’s frightened of, don’t you admit it?’

Mr March broke into laughter. He had become carefree in a way that made his black anxiety of a quarter of an hour before difficult to bring back to mind. He was, in fact, carefree as I had not seen him in his son’s presence for years past. The last few minutes — after Charles showed his ignorance of the attacks — had seemed like the first days I saw them together. Mr March’s cares were dispelled; he grinned at his son’s teasing, he paid it back with teasing of his own. It was like old days. As we said good night, Mr March remarked cheerfully to Charles: ‘You’re making a frightful ass of yourself, living in your unsalubrious abode by the river, I refuse to accept any responsibility for the effects on your health. But I’m always glad to see you in my house.’

30: A Walk From Bryanston Square to Pimlico

It was a fine, warm night, and Charles and I decided to walk home. I had a house in Chelsea by this time, and so we could go the same way. As we crossed over to the park, Charles said: ‘You’d heard all this commotion about Uncle Philip before?’

I told him that it had begun at the birthday party. ‘It’s a curious story,’ he said.

He was not actively interested. He was sorry that Philip should be disturbed, but he did not feel himself involved. I thought of asking him to mention it to Ann, and considered that it was wiser not to. Soon he changed the subject.

The night air was soft, the park was spotted with couples lying mouth-to-mouth. We walked slowly, tired and comfortably relaxed. With the pleasure of an old intimacy, we talked as we had not done for years. Of our marriages, so different in all that had happened to us and yet both childless. ‘Yes,’ said Charles, with comradeship, ‘it will be sad if neither of us leaves a son to follow him.’

We talked of our careers, and for the first time Charles told me how he felt about being a doctor. We had just left the park, and were waiting to cross the road at the end of Piccadilly. Cars were hooting by, and Charles had to pause until he could make himself heard.

‘Often I’ve disliked it strongly, of course,’ he said. ‘More often I’ve found it extremely dull. You’d expect so, wouldn’t you? There’s a fair amount of human interest, of course, but one’s got to be patient to get even that. A GP isn’t dealing continually with crises of life and death, you know. Nine-tenths of his time he’s seeing people with colds and nerves and indigestion and rheumatism. That’s the basis of the job, and if you’re looking for human interest, people exhibit slightly less of it when they’ve a bad cold than when they haven’t.’

As we walked down Grosvenor Place, Charles went on: ‘A doctor has his moments, but most of his time it can’t be interesting. It just can’t. The percentage of ordinary workaday tedium is bound to be high. And I suspect that’s true of any job, isn’t it? One always hears them described with their high moments heightened a bit; it’s nice to hear, but it’s quite different when you begin living them. Don’t you agree? Don’t you admit that’s true? Look, Lewis, you possess a great capacity for getting interest out of what you’re doing: I’ve never met anyone with a greater: but tell the truth, isn’t your own job — aren’t the various jobs you’ve tackled — mostly tedious when you come to live them?’

We argued for a time. Charles said: ‘Anyway, doctoring is tedious for nine hours out of every ten. Anyone who tells you it isn’t either doesn’t know what excitement is or suffers from an overdose of romantic imagination. And for me it’s also tedious in rather a different way. I don’t think you’ll sympathize much with this. But I mean that it doesn’t give me anything hard to bite on mentally. I’ve got a taste for thinking: but I shouldn’t be any worse a doctor if I were a much more stupid man.’

Since we began our walk, he had been talking without guard. He was not trying to protect or disguise himself, and at this point he did not attempt to conceal his intellectual arrogance, his certainty of his own intellectual power, his regret as he felt that power rusting.

‘So you see,’ Charles gave a smile. ‘I’m resigned to being distinctly bored for the rest of my life.’

‘But there are compensations,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘there are compensations.’

‘There are compensations,’ he repeated. ‘Each month I count up my earnings very carefully. Last month I made over eighty pounds — if they all pay me. You’ve no idea how pleasant it is to earn your own living. It’s a pleasure you can only really appreciate if you’ve been supported in luxury ever since you were born.’ He smiled broadly, and added:

‘There are other compensations too. People show such confidence in one. It’s nice to be able to justify that sometimes. Once or twice in the last few weeks I’ve felt some use.’

We had crossed in front of Victoria Station and came out into Wilton Road. I asked: ‘Charles, if you had your time again, would you make the same choice?’

‘Without any doubt,’ he said.

I looked at him under the light of a street lamp. He had become older than any of us. He was carrying a mackintosh; he was stooping more than he used to. At that moment — while he was saying, his eyes glinting maliciously at his own expense: ‘If I had my time again, I might not even take quite so long to make up my mind’ — I was moved back to the evening in Regent Street long ago, when we argued about goodness. I felt the shock that assails one as one suddenly sees an intimate in a transfiguring light, the shock of utter familiarity and utter surprise. Here was Charles, whom I knew so well, whom I took for granted with the ease of a long friendship — and at the same time, I was thinking with incredulity, as though I had never met him before, what a curious choice he had made.

In Antrobus Street the light was glowing over the night-bell. We said good-night in front of his house, and I began to walk west along the Embankment. The night was so caressingly warm that I wanted to linger, looking at the river. There was an oily swell on the dark water, and on the swell the bands of reflected light slowly swayed. I could see the red and green eyes of lamps on the bridges up the river. I stayed there, watching the bands of light sway on the water, and, as I watched, among the day-dreams drifting through my mind were memories and thoughts about Charles.

The river smell was carried on a breath of air. Down towards Chelsea the water glistened and a red light flashed. Leaning on the Embankment, I thought that, in a different time, when the conscience of the rich was not so sick, Charles might not have sacrificed himself, at least not so completely. Some of his abnegation one could attribute to his time, just as some of his surface quirks, his outbursts of arrogance and diffidence, one could attribute to his being born a Jew.

But none of that seemed to me to matter very much, compared with what I thought I had seen in him, walking in the Wilton Road half an hour before.

I thought I had seen a nature which, at the deepest, was never sure of love. Never sure of receiving it: perhaps never sure of giving it: vulnerable and at the same time resenting any approach.

It was the kind of nature which could have broken his life — for men with that flaw at the root often spend their lives in pursuing unrequited love, or indulging their cruelty on others, or tormenting themselves with jealousy, or retiring into loneliness and spiritual pride. But in Charles this deepest self was housed in a temperament in all other respects strong, active, healthy, full of vigour. It was that blazing contrast which I had seen, or imagined that I had seen.

Perhaps it was that contrast which made him want to search for the good.

He had always been fascinated by the idea of goodness. Was it because he was living constantly with a part of himself which he hated? To know what goodness means, perhaps one needs to have lain awake at night, hating one’s own nature. The sweet, the harmonious, the untempted, have no reason to hate their natures; it is the others, the guilty or the sadic — it seemed to me most of all the sadic — who are driven to find what goodness is.

But men like Charles did not find it in themselves. It was not as easy as all that. He wanted to be good; so his active nature led him to want to do good. He was living a useful life now — but that was all. No one felt that as a result he had reached a state of goodness: he never felt it for a moment himself. He knew that, with his insight and sarcastic honesty. He would have liked to feel goodness in himself — he would have liked to believe that others felt it. But he knew that in fact others often felt a sense of strain, because he was acting against part of his nature. They did not feel he was apt for a life of abnegation. They distrusted his conscience, and looked back with regret to the days before it dominated him — to the days, indeed, in which they remembered him as gay, malicious, idle, brilliant.

I looked down at the water, not wanting to drag myself away. I had never felt more fond of him, and into my thoughts there flickered and passed scenes in which he had taken part, the night of our examination years before, quarrels in Bryanston Square, a glimpse of him walking with his arm round Ann. I thought I had seen in him that night some of the goodness he admired. But not in the way he had searched for it. Instead, there was a sparkle of good in the irony with which he viewed his own efforts; in the disillusioned certainty with which he knew that he at least was right to be useful, that he could have chosen no other way, even if it now seemed prosaic, lacking in the radiance which others attained by chance.

Most of all there was a sparkle of good in the state to which his struggle with his own nature had brought him. He could still hate himself. Through that hatred, and not through his conscience, through the nights when he had lain awake darkened by remorse, he had taken into his blood the sarcastic astringent experience of life which shone out of him as he comforted another’s self-reproach and lack of self-forgiveness.

31: A Success and a Failure

I did not see Mr March again before the day I had arranged to meet Herbert Getliffe, but I received an anxious note, saying that he hoped I would persevere with my enquiries and relieve his mind as soon as I had information. The lull of reassurance was over and his worry was nagging at him again. There were few states more infectious than anxiety, I thought, as I walked through the courts to Getliffe’s chambers, with an edge to my own nerves.

Getliffe had taken silk a year before. There he was, sitting at his great desk, where I had sat beside him often enough. Four briefs were untied in front of him; on a side table stood perhaps thirty more, these neatly stacked and the pink ribbons tied. I caught sight of a lavish fee on the top one — it might not have been accidental that it was that fee a visitor could see.

For two or three minutes after I was shown in, Getliffe stared intently at the brief he was studying. His brow was furrowed, his neck stiff with concentration; he was the model of a man absorbed. This was a new mannerism altogether. At last he looked up.

‘Heavens, you’re here, are you, L S?’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I was so completely up to the eyes that I just didn’t realize. Well, it’s good to see you, L S.’

I asked him how his practice was going since he took silk.

‘I mustn’t grumble,’ said Getliffe, sweeping an arm towards the briefs on the side table. ‘No, I mustn’t grumble. It was a grave decision to take; I should like you to remember what a grave decision it was. I could have rubbed on for ever as a junior, and it would have kept me in shoe-leather’ — his dignity cracked for a second — ‘and the occasional nice new hat.’ Then he settled himself even more impressively. ‘But two considerations influenced me, L S. I thought of the increased chances it would give one to give promising young men their first jump on the ladder. One could be more useful to a lot more young men. Young men in the position you were, when you first came looking for a friendly eye. Believe me, I thought of you personally, L S, when I was making the decision. You know how much I like helping brilliant young men. Perhaps that was the most important consideration. The other was that one owes a duty to one’s profession and if one can keep oneself alive as a counsel of His Majesty, one ought not to refuse the responsibility.’

No one could have enjoyed it more, I thought. No one could have more enjoyed throwing himself into this new, serious, senatorial part. He added: ‘Of course, if one keeps one’s head above water, one gets certain consolations for the responsibility. I’m thankful to say that may happen.’ He chuckled. ‘I haven’t had to cut off my evening glass of beer. And it’s fun to take my wife round the town and order a dollop of champagne without doing sums in the head.’ He was in triumphant form. He felt he was going to arrive. He kept giving me heavy homilies, such as were due from a man of weight. He believed them, just as he believed in everything he said while he was saying it.

After a time I said: ‘By the way, I came to ask you something.’

‘If there is any help I can give you, L S,’ said Getliffe, ‘you have only to ask. Ask away.’

‘You remember the trouble that happened just before your brother’s wedding?’

‘What trouble?’

‘Rumours were going round about some investments in Howard & Hazlehurst.’

Getliffe looked at me sternly.

‘Who are Howard & Hazlehurst?’ he said.

He seemed to believe that he had forgotten. I reminded him of our conversation that evening in chambers, when he was frightened that Porson would expose the deal.

‘I remember it vaguely,’ said Getliffe. He went on reprovingly: ‘I always thought that you exaggerated the danger. You’re a bit too highly strung for the rough and tumble, you know. I think you were very wise to remove yourself most of your time to a place with ivy round the walls. One has to be very strong for this kind of life.’ He paused. ‘Yes, I remember it vaguely. I’m sorry to say that poor old Porson has gone right down the hill since then.’

‘I wanted to ask you,’ I said, ‘if you’d heard that some similar rumours were going round now.’

‘I have been told of some nonsense or other,’ said Getliffe in a firm and confident tone. ‘They appear to be saying that I used inside knowledge last year. I’ve ignored it so far: but if they go on I shall have to protect myself. One owes a duty to one’s position.’

‘Have they the slightest excuse to go on?’

‘I shouldn’t let everyone ask me that question, L S,’ said Getliffe reproachfully. ‘But we know each other well enough to pass it. You’ve seen me do things that I hope and believe I couldn’t do nowadays. So I’ll answer you. They haven’t the slightest excuse, either in law or out of it. I’ve never had a cleaner sheet than I’ve had the last two years. And if I can prove these people are throwing mud, they’ll find it a more expensive game than snooker.’ He looked at me steadily with his brown, opaque eyes. He said: ‘I can’t answer for anyone else. I can’t answer for March, Hawtin, or the ministerial bigwigs, but I’m glad to say that my own sheet is absolutely clean. A good deal cleaner, I might tell you, than some of our common acquaintances’ about the time that you were dragging up just now. I suppose you know that old Sir Philip did himself remarkably well out of the Howard & Hazlehurst affair? He was much too slim to have anything to do with Howard & Hazlehurst, of course. No, he just bought a whole great wad in a rocky little company whose shares were down to twopence and a kiss from everyone on the board. Well, Howard & Hazlehurst took over that company six months later. They wanted it for their new contract. Those shares are now 41s. 6d. and as safe as young Aunt Fanny. Our friends in Israel must have made a packet.’

His manner became weighty again, as he went on: ‘I must tell you that I strongly disapprove. I strongly disapproved when it happened, though I was a younger man then and I hadn’t done as well as I have now. I don’t believe anyone in an official position ought to have any dealings, that is, speculative dealings, on the Stock Exchange. And I should like to advise you against it, L S. There must be times in your little consultancy when you gain a bit of inside knowledge that a not-too-scrupulous man could turn into money. I dare say you’d bring it off every now and then. But you’ll be happier if you don’t do it. I don’t know what you collect from your little consultancy and that job of yours with the ivy round the walls. But I advise you to be content with it, whatever it is. I’m content with mine, I don’t mind telling you.’

We went out for lunch. As usual, I paid. When I left him, on my way to find Porson at an address in Notting Hill, two thoughts were chasing each other through my mind. Getliffe was speaking the truth about his ‘clean sheet’ in recent years. His protests were for once innocent, not brazen; it was a luxury for him to have such a clear conscience. The rumours about him seemed to be quite false. That surprised me; but it did not surprise me anything like so much as his revelation about Sir Philip. I did not know how much to believe; remembering Mr March’s report of his visit to Philip’s bedside, I was sure there was something in it.

Porson had given me an address in Notting Hill. When I reached it, I was met by his landlady, who said that he had been called away that morning: he had left a message that he would write again and fix another rendezvous. The house was decrepit, the landlady was suspicious of me, on guard for Porson; he was living in a flat up the third flight of shabby stairs.

I called on friends who might have heard the gossip — radical journalists, civil servants, barristers who knew Getliffe. Several of them had picked up the rumours, but no one told me anything new. Some were excited because there was scandal in the air. Even when one man said: ‘I don’t like the idea of a Dreyfus case started by the left,’ his eyes were bright and glowing.

Then I told Mr March what I had found out. The rumours, I said, all referred to a leakage within the past year. I told him that Herbert Getliffe seemed not to be in any way responsible this time. If even one of these rumours was brought into the open, it looked entirely safe to sue straight away. But I also told Mr March that, though I could not see the bearing, he ought to hear Getliffe’s story about Sir Philip.

Mr March listened in silence. At the end he said: ‘I am deeply obliged to you for your friendly services.’ His expression was not relieved, but he said: ‘I may inform you that my brother Philip yesterday appeared to think that the affair was blowing over. I have always found that persons in public life become liable to a quite unwarranted optimism.’ Mr March himself showed no optimism.

I waited three weeks before I heard from Porson. Then a note came in his tall fluent hand, which said: ‘I expect you have guessed what chase has kept me away from London. I will tell you about her when I meet you. I insist on going to the University match, and shall return in time for the first day. Do you feel like joining me, even though your respectable friends may see us there and count it against you?’

I found him on the first morning, sitting on the top of the stand at the Nursery end. I had not seen him for two years, and I was shocked by the change. Under his eyes, screwed up in the sunlight, the pouches were embossed, heavy, purplish-brown. His colour was higher and more plethoric than ever, and the twitch convulsed his face every time he spoke. His suit was old, shiny at the cuffs, but he was wearing a carnation in his buttonhole and an Authentic tie. He welcomed me with a hearty aggressive show of pleasure. ‘Ah well, my boy, I’m glad you haven’t boycotted me. I need some company, the way these people are patting about.’ His face twitched as he looked irascibly out to the pitch. ‘It’s going to be bloody dull. I hope it won’t mean your being crossed off many visiting lists if some of your friends notice you’re here with me. Anyway, it’s bloody good to see you.’

We sat there in the sun most of that day. In his loud, resonant, angry voice Porson told me of his misfortunes. Three years before, he had lost a case in which Herbert Getliffe was leading for the other side. He had never worked up a steady practice. But he persuaded himself that, until that time, he was just on the point of success. Even now he could not admit that he had mismanaged the case. It was intolerable for him to remember that he had been outmanoeuvred by Getliffe, on the one occasion they had been on opposite sides in court. But he could not help admitting that for three years past the solicitors had fought shy of him. He went out of his way to admit it, pressing on the aching tooth, in a loud, rancorous tone that rang round the top of the stand at Lord’s.

Often his discontent vented itself on the batsmen. A young man was playing a useful, elegant innings. It was pretty cricket, but Porson was not appeased. ‘What does he think he’s playing at?’ he demanded. ‘What does he think he’s doing? I insist these boys ought to be taught to hit the bloody ball.’

At the close of play we walked down to Baker Street, and Porson became quieter in the hot, calm evening, in the light which softened the faces in the streets. He confided the reason he had been away from London. A girl half his age had fallen in love with him, and they had been staying together by the sea. ‘The way it began was the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me,’ he said. ‘She was old —’s secretary, and I used to borrow her sometimes. Not that I need a secretary nowadays. Ah well, she came in one morning, and I hadn’t the least idea, my boy. She just threw her arms round my neck and said she loved me. I couldn’t believe it, I told her that she wanted a nice young man who’d make her a decent husband. She said she wanted me. She thought that I was so clever and so masterful and so kind. And she was sure I ought to have been happy if some woman hadn’t treated me badly. She thought she could make it up for me.’ He looked at me with an expression humble, bewildered, incredulous. ‘I tell you, my boy, I do believe she loved me a little. I’ve chased a few women, but I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. I’ve been glad if they’ve liked me. I’ve been prepared to pay for my fun and when they got tired I’ve sent them away with a bit of jewellery and a smack on the behind.’

We walked on a few steps. He said: ‘I hope I haven’t done the girl any harm. She wasn’t really my cup of tea. Ah well, she’s not losing much. It can’t matter much to anyone, losing me.’

He insisted on taking me to the Savoy and giving me a lavish dinner. I could not refuse, for fear of reminding him that now I was comfortably off and that he was living on his capital. He exulted in being generous; it gave him an overbearing pleasure to press food and drink on me. ‘You can use another drink,’ he kept on saying. ‘And so can I. By God, we’ll have another bottle of champagne.’

Soon he became drunk, vehemently drunk. He abandoned himself to hates and wishes. He boasted of the things he could still do; there was still time to gain triumphs at the Bar and, he said, ‘show them how wrong they are. Show them just where their bloody intrigues and prejudices have led them. Just because I’m not a pansy or a Jew they’ve preferred to ignore me. I tell you, my lad, you’ve got to be a pansy or a Jew to get a chance in this bloody country.’ Drunkenly he saw lurid, romantic conspiracies directed at himself; drunkenly he talked politics. It was the crudest kind of reactionary politics, inflamed by drink, hate, and failure. He talked of women: he boasted of his conquests now, instead of speaking as he had done on the way to Baker Street. Boastfully he talked of nights in the past. Yet his tongue was far less coarse than when he talked politics, less coarse than most men’s when talking sex. He was a man whom people disliked for being aggressive, boastful, rancorous, and vulgar; he was all those things; but, when he thought of women, he became delicate, diffident, and naïf.

Throughout the day, I had not mentioned why I had written to him. Partly because I had an affection for him, and wanted him to feel I was with him for his own sake: partly because I thought it was not safe to talk while he was in a resentful mood. At last I risked asking when he had last seen Ann. He answered, gently enough, in the spring: he remembered the exact date. I went on to ask whether he knew what she was doing politically nowadays.

He stared at me with an over-intent, over-steady gaze, as though if I moved my head he might fall down. He said: ‘If you want to talk about her, you’d better come to my blasted flat. It’s only a temporary place, of course. I shall insist on somewhere better soon.’

As we got into the taxi, he repeated, with drunken fury: ‘I shall insist on somewhere better soon. It’s not the sort of place most of your friends are living in.’ He went on: ‘I can’t talk about her until I’ve cooled down.’

After he had climbed the shabby stairs of the house in Notting Hill, I looked at his little sitting-room. It was crowded with furniture. There was a glass-fronted bookcase, another glass-fronted case full of china, two tables, a desk, a divan. Yet each piece was dusted and shining: I suddenly realized that he must be obsessively tidy. It might have been the room of a finicky old maid.

On the table by the divan stood a photograph of Ann. She did not photograph well. Her face looked flat, undistinguished, lifeless; there was no sign of the moulding of her cheekbones. Anyone who only knew her from her photograph would not have thought her so much as good-looking. As I turned away, I saw Porson’s face. He was still looking at the picture with eyes clouded and bloodshot with drink, and his expression was rapt.

‘You loved her very much, didn’t you?’ I said.

He did not reply immediately. Then he said: ‘I still do.’

He added: ‘I think I always shall.’

A little later, he said: ‘I should like to tell you something. It may sound incredible to you, but I should like to tell you. I believe she’ll come to me some day. She can’t be happy with her husband. She’s loyal, she’s told me that she is happy, but I’ve never credited it. Anyway, she knows that I’m waiting for her if ever she wants to come. She knows that I’d do anything for her. By God, she knows that will always be true.’

He wanted us both to start drinking again, but I dissuaded him.

We sat on the divan and I led him back to my question about Ann’s political actions. His face became sullen and pained.

‘I never liked them, of course. But I attribute them entirely to her blasted husband. If she were really happy with him, she would have given them up. It stands to reason. If she had married me, I believe I should have made her happy, and these things wouldn’t have interested her any more. I insist on attributing them to that blasted March.’ He told me many facts about her, most of which I knew.

Then he told me something which I did not know — that she was one of the group that produced the Note. The Note was a private news-sheet, cyclostyled like an old-fashioned school magazine, distributed through the post, on the model of one or two others of that time. It was run by an acquaintance of mine called Humphrey Seymour; he was a communist, but he had been born into the ruling world and still moved within it. In fact, the charm of the Note (it was subscribed to by many who had no idea of its politics) was that its news seemed to come from right inside the ruling world. Some of the news, so Porson told me, was provided by Ann.

‘Of course she can go anywhere,’ he said. ‘She was brought up in the right places, and she’s got the entrée wherever she wants. And I don’t put that down to the Jews, I might tell you. It’s just because she makes herself liked wherever she goes.’

Ronald Porson was still doing the detective work of love; he followed her track from dinner-party to dinner-party; often he could see where she had picked up a piece of information for use in the Note.

‘That’s why I had to refuse her something for the first time in my life,’ he said.

‘Why?’ It did not seem likely to be interesting: the heavy drunken sentiment was wearing me down.

‘She’s an honourable person, isn’t she?’

I nodded, but he came back at me fiercely.

‘I don’t want to be humoured,’ he shouted. ‘Despite her blasted politics, isn’t she the soul of honour, yes or no?’

I thought, and gave a serious answer.

‘Yes.’

‘And I am too, aren’t I? Damn you, am I an honourable man, yes or no?’

‘Yes.’ Again, in a curious sense, it was dead true.

‘Well then. The last time I saw her, I told you it was in the spring, she wanted to see me at short notice. That’s what she’ll do when she comes back to me. And she reminded me that I once found out some pretty stories about that shyster Getliffe — found out how he’d played the markets and laughed at decent people who respect positions of trust and got away with the whole blasted shoot. Well, Ann wanted all the details. She told me — that’s where her honour comes in, that’s where she’d never think of going behind my back — is that true, yes or no?’

After I had answered, his voice quietened, and he said: ‘She asked me for the details. She told me that she might want to use them.’

He was by this time speaking in a throbbing whisper, but it seemed loud.

‘I couldn’t give her them,’ said Ronald Porson. He wiped trickles of sweat from his cheeks. ‘I’ve not refused her anything before, but I couldn’t do that. I didn’t like refusing, but it stuck in my gullet to help that blasted group of reds. I insist they’ve got at her, of course. She’s always had a good heart and they’ve taken advantage of it. I insist on putting the blame on to them and her blasted husband. And I refuse to help them impose on her. I’ve never said no to anything she’s asked me before, but I couldn’t stomach helping those reds in their blasted games. I’ve no use for Getliffe, he’s a bloody charlatan and a bloody crook, and the sooner he’s exposed the better. But I insist that the reds aren’t the people to do it.’ He paused. ‘I was tempted when she asked me. I don’t want to say no to her again. Ah well! I expect she understands.’

32: Two Kinds of Self-Control

The next morning I rang up Ann and asked if I could see her at once. The same evening I arrived at Antrobus Street at half past six, in the middle of Charles’ surgery hour. She was waiting for me in her drawing-room; outside the house was dingy, but the room struck bright. It was her own taste, I thought, as I glanced at the Dufys on the cream-papered walls. She herself looked both calm and pretty. Her first words were: ‘We know what you’ve come for, don’t we?’ She gazed at me with steady blue eyes, without expression. I said: ‘Do you? It will be easier if you do.’

‘It can’t be very easy, can it?’

‘How in God’s name,’ I said, ‘did you come to get into this mess?’

‘No.’ She sounded more equable and business-like than I did; she was not going to begin on those terms. ‘It isn’t as simple as that.’

I settled myself to wait for her.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘you haven’t decided what to do?’

‘We’re not certain yet.’

She was saying ‘we’ again. Business-like as she sounded, she was making it clear that Charles knew everything. She was glad to bring him in. It was the only sign of emotion she had shown so far.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘you’ve come about the Getliffe affair?’

I nodded.

‘I knew it.’

‘You’ve been mixed up in that, haven’t you?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Didn’t you see what it was going to mean?’

She was unmoved. ‘Not everything, no,’ she said.

‘I can’t understand what you were trying to do.’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘how much I can tell you.’

‘I don’t even understand what the line is,’ I said.

Deliberately I was using a bit of her own jargon. She looked at me, knowing that I was not unsophisticated politically, knowing that I had an idea how ‘the party’ went about its work.

She began to explain, keeping back little, so far as I could judge, though some of the manoeuvres still puzzled me. The ‘line’, she said, I ought to know: it was to get rid of this government and rally all the anti-fascists to do so, whoever they were, Churchillites, middle-of-the-roaders, labour people, intellectuals. Unless we did just that, this government would sell the pass altogether, she said. Unless we got rid of it, Hitler and his fascists would have power on a scale no one had had before: that meant the end of us all, liberals and men of good will, Gentiles and Jews.

‘Jews first,’ said Ann in a neutral tone. ‘Mr March and his friends might remember that.’

She looked at me and said: ‘The point is, we’ve got to get people acting now. You can’t disagree about that, can you?’

‘No,’ I said. I was speaking out of conviction. ‘I can’t disagree with that.’

‘There isn’t much time,’ she said.

That was where the Note got its orders. Its job was to damage personal credit: it was to chase any scandal anywhere near the government, or even the chance of any scandal. It was not to run straight into libels, but it would take risks that an ordinary newspaper would not. Oddly enough, it was better placed than an ordinary newspaper to collect some kinds of scandal: Ann and another colleague and Seymour himself most of all had acquaintances deep in official society, at nearly all levels except at the very top.

Yet, I began to ask her, what were they hoping for? A few thousand cyclostyled sheets — what was the circulation of the paper?

‘Nineteen thousand,’ she said.

A bit of scandal going to a few thousand people — what was the use of that?

‘It helps,’ she said. Once more she spoke without expression, with the absence of outward emotion which had surprised, and indeed harassed me, since I arrived. Nevertheless I felt within her a kind of satisfaction which those who only look on at politics never reach. It was a satisfaction made up of a sense of action, of love of action, and of humility. It did not occur to her to argue that the Note’s significance was greater than it seemed, that its public was an influential one, that what it said in its messy sheets got round. No: this was the job she had been set, and she was devoted to it. It was as humble as that.

Early in the year, she told me, someone had collected a piece of gossip about Hawtin, the man Mr March had mentioned. Hawtin, like Sir Philip, was a parliamentary secretary: but, unlike Sir Philip, he was not an old man getting his last job, but a young one on the rise. He also happened to be a focus of detestation for the left. The gossip was that he had made money because he knew where an armaments contract was to be placed. But Seymour and his friends, Ann said, could not prove it. They could not get at him; they tried all their usual sources, but found nothing to go on. I gathered that one or two of their sources were shady, and some not so much shady as irregular in a most unexpected way: I was almost sure they had an informant in the civil service. When they were at a loss, someone discovered that Hawtin, who was a lawyer by profession, had once had business dealings with Herbert Getliffe. It was then that Ann recalled what she had heard against Getliffe years before. At once she brought out the stories in the Note office: this had been a real scandal, she could track it down and get it tied and labelled.

‘Why didn’t you remember?’ I said.

‘What was there to remember?’

‘Didn’t you think how Philip March’s name kept coming in, when we were all worried before Katherine’s wedding?’

‘I didn’t give it a thought,’ she replied.

‘Why not?’

‘I had plenty of things against him, but I could never have imagined he’d have got mixed up in a wretched business like this, could you have done?’

I took her at her word. I asked her:

‘But you must have imagined that if you dug up the Getliffe affair—’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you did that, it was coming close to home.’

I meant that it would damage Katherine through her husband: Ann knew what I meant, and did not pretend.

‘I thought of that, of course I did. But we wanted the exact dope on Getliffe just as a lead-in to the job. It was a good time ago, I didn’t think we should want to use it.’

‘Did you think there was a risk?’

She looked straight at me.

‘Yes, I thought there was a risk. I didn’t think it was very real.’

‘Are they going to use it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘How possible?’

‘It’s just about as likely as not.’

All the time I had been with her, I had had a feeling that I scarcely knew her at all. It was not her politics that struck so strange: I expected all that. I expected her sense of duty. It was not that she had been unfriendly or ambiguous. On the contrary, she had been precise, direct, completely in command of herself. It had been I who was showing the temper and wear-and-tear. What made her seem so strange was just that control. Her voice had not given a quiver of strain. Her head had stayed erect, unnaturally still, as though the muscles of her neck were stiff.

To my astonishment, she did not know the exact position about the original Getliffe scandal. Porson had refused to tell her the details, and she had not discovered them from anyone else: when she failed, the Note had set another person on the same search. It was characteristic of them that she had not been told whom he had been talking to, or whether he had got all the facts. I asked again if the Note were going to use the story. She gave the same answer as before.

‘Can it be stopped?’ I broke out. ‘I could go to Humphrey Seymour—’

‘You’d better not waste any time.’

‘I don’t want to go unless it’s necessary.’

She meant: this was her work, these people were her allies, it was bitter to get in their way.

‘It’s irresponsible,’ I said, ‘not to go to him at once.’

‘We’ve got different ideas of responsibility, haven’t we?’

‘Not so completely different,’ I said. ‘If your people really begin splashing Philip March’s name about, you know what it will mean.’

‘I haven’t any special concern for Philip,’ she said. ‘He’s a reactionary old man. If he has had his fingers in this business, then he deserves what comes to him.’

‘I wasn’t thinking so much of him.’ I paused. ‘But Mr March?’

She replied: ‘You know what happened between us. Since then I haven’t felt that he had any claim on me.’

I paused again. Then I said: ‘Have you thought what it would mean for Charles?’ Her eyes stayed steady, looking into mine. For a second I totally misread her face. She had spoken of Mr March in a reasonable tone, but one hardened, I thought, with resentment, the memory of an injustice still fresh. Her eyes were sparkling; she seemed just about to smile. Instead her throat and cheeks reddened: her brow went smooth with anger. At last her control had broken, and she said:

‘I won’t tolerate any interference between Charles and me. Go and make your own wife love you as much as I love Charles. If she’s capable of recognizing who you are. Then I might listen to anything you say about my marriage.’

I did not speak.

Ann said: ‘I’m sorry. That was an unforgivable thing to say.’

Slowly — I was not thinking of her or Charles — I replied: ‘You wouldn’t have said it unless—’ I stopped, my own thoughts ran away with me. I made another effort: ‘Unless you were afraid of what you might do to Charles.’

We both sat silent. I was leaning forward, my chin in my hands. I scarcely noticed that she had crossed the room until I felt her arm round my shoulders.

‘I’m desperately sorry,’ she said.

I tried to talk to her again.

‘I still think,’ I said, ‘that you ought to speak to Seymour pretty soon.’

‘It’s not easy. Don’t you see it’s not easy?’

I told her that she would have to do it. She pressed my hand and went back to her chair. We sat opposite each other, not speaking again, until Charles came in.

She sprang up. He took her in his arms and kissed her. She asked how the surgery had gone. He told her something about a case, his arms still round her, and asked about herself. They were absorbed in each other. No one could have seen them that night without being moved by the depth and freshness of their love.

Over his shoulder Charles glanced at me, sitting in the pool of light from the reading-lamp.

‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘You’re looking pale.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I tell you, it’s nothing. No, I’ve been talking to Ann about this Getliffe business.’

He glanced at Ann. ‘I expected that was it,’ he said. They sat side by side on the sofa. Without waiting for any kind of preliminaries, I said: ‘I’ve been telling Ann she ought to go straight to Seymour.

To my astonishment, Charles began to smile.

‘Why is that funny?’ I was on edge.

‘Did you know he was at school with me? It’s strange, I shouldn’t have guessed that he’d crop up again—’

He was still smiling at what seemed to be a memory.

‘I’m quite sure,’ I said, ‘that Ann ought to go round to the Note tomorrow.’

‘That’s getting a bit frantic, isn’t it?’ Charles said, in a friendly tone.

I could not help overstating my case. ‘Tomorrow,’ I repeated, getting more emphatic because I could not find a reason.

‘You don’t want to go along unless it’s the last resort, do you?’ said Charles to Ann, and their eyes met in trust.

The curious thing was, Charles did not seem much worried. Ann was so torn that she had said something I should not be able to forget. That apart, I was acutely anxious. Yet Charles, who was himself given to anxiety, who had much more foresight than most men, seemed almost immune from what was affecting us. True, he was much further from politics than Ann was, a good deal further even than I was myself. Nevertheless, it was strange to see him so unruffled, giving us the drinks which, in the grip of the argument, Ann had not thought of. With a kind of temperate irritation, he said: ‘I must say, the thing which I really dislike is that we misled Mr L. Quite unintentionally, of course, but it’s the sort of thing any of us would dislike, wouldn’t they?’

He meant, when Mr March told him of the rumours about Sir Philip and he had said that neither he nor Ann had any knowledge of them. It had been true then: at the time, Ann was trying to find out about Getliffe and no one but Getliffe. But it would not have been true a week or two later.

‘I’ve explained the position to him now, of course,’ he said.

‘Did he accept it?’ I asked.

‘As much as he could accept anything,’ said Charles.

‘When did you talk to him?’

Charles gave me the date. I had seen Mr March since, but he had not mentioned a word about it.

‘I also explained Ann’s connection with the Note,’ said Charles. ‘I thought it was right to do that.’

For a few seconds it was all quiet. Then Ann said to him: ‘Look, if you think Lewis is right and I ought to tell the Note about it—’

‘It means making a private plea, doesn’t it? And you wouldn’t want to unless it’s really dangerous?’

‘Of course I shouldn’t want to.’ She added, talking to him as though I was not there: ‘I’ll do it tomorrow if you think I ought to.’

Suddenly I felt that she wanted him to tell her to. He was hesitating. He could have settled it for her, but he seemed reluctant or disinclined.

He knew, of course, better than I did how much political action, the paper itself, meant to her. But it was not only consideration and empathy that held him back. Nearly all the Marches, seeing his hesitation, would have had no doubt about it: he was under her influence, she was the stronger, he did what she told him.

The truth was just the opposite. Often he behaved to her, as now, with what seemed to many people an exaggerated consideration, a kind of chivalry which made one uncomfortable. But the reason was not that he was her slave, but that she was his. She adored him: at the heart of their marriage she was completely in his power. It was out of a special gratitude, it was to make a kind of amend, that he was driven to consider her so, in things which mattered less.

To understand his hesitation just then, one needed to have been present that night when Mr March accused her of ‘wearing the trousers’ — and Charles’ smile, unpredictable as forked lightning, lit up the room.

‘If you think I ought to,’ she said.

‘You mustn’t decide anything now,’ he said, with deliberation, with careful sense. ‘But there might be a time when you’ll have to, mightn’t there?’

33: Summer Night

After that night I did not hear whether Ann had made her explanations to the Note. On my way down to Haslingfield, a fortnight later, I took with me a file of the paper: I wanted to know what legal risks they ran.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that I arrived at Haslingfield. I found Mr March occupied with Katherine’s children, telling me that he had had no fresh news from Philip and at the same time rolling a ball along the floor for his grandson to run after. It was a wet, warm summer day and the windows of the drawing-room stood open. The little boy was aged four, and his fair hair glistened as he scampered after the ball. His sister, aged two, was crawling round Mr March’s legs. Mr March rolled the ball again, and told them they were ‘making frightful asses of themselves’.

Gazing at them, Mr March said to Katherine and me: ‘I must say they look remarkably Anglo-Saxon.’

Each of the children had the March eyes, and it seemed that they would stay fair.

Mr March went on: ‘They look remarkably unlike the uglier members of our family. Hannah says that everyone in the family is more presentable when young, but I told her that she must have forgotten Caroline’s children in their infancy.’

Katherine chuckled. She and her father were not only becoming fonder of each other, but the bond of sympathy between them seemed to grow stronger each time I saw them. She was pregnant again, and he had insisted that she came to Haslingfield during July, ‘on the firm undertaking’, as he wrote to her, ‘that you attempt to run the household, though I have never concealed my lack of faith in your abilities in that direction, until a date when your attention is distracted by other developments’.

Actually, she ran the household so that it was more comfortable than I remembered: since her marriage, she had cultivated a talent for comfort. Not even Mr March kept a closer eye on one’s physical whims, frailties, likes and dislikes.

That evening, as we waited before dinner for Mr March, I was presented with a Moselle which she had noticed me enjoy on my first visit to Haslingfield, when Charles and Ann were within a few hours of meeting.

Katherine said: ‘You remember that night, don’t you, Lewis? I was tremendously excited because Francis was coming next day. And you made a remark which might have meant that you guessed I was in love. I lay awake a bit that night wondering whether you really intended it. Francis says that was probably the only sleep he’s ever cost me. But I remind him that it was only for an hour.’

She was content. Her third child was due in early August; with Mr-March-like precision, she announced the probable day with a margin of error plus or minus. Also like Mr March, she harried her doctors, wanted to know the reasons for their actions, and would not be put off by bedside patter. Francis had told me some stories about her that were very much in her father’s line, full of the same physical curiosity and the same assumption that a doctor is someone whose time you pay for, and whose advice you consider rather as you would an electrician’s when he brings a new type of bulb. ‘I don’t believe you treat doctors in her fashion,’ Francis had said, ‘unless you have been born scandalously rich.’

Katherine denied it. But as a rule she was content to follow his lead. Just as she had once accepted her brother’s opinions, now she accepted her husband’s. She had resisted everyone’s attempts to educate her: first Charles’, and then Francis’, with some irregular incursions of my own.

Yet I often felt that she had matured faster than any of us. In a way singularly like her father’s after he retired from business, she had become at twenty-seven completely, solidly, and happily herself.

Her anxieties now were all about her children. Her self-conscious moments were so mild that she laughed at them. After one of her dinner parties she would keep Francis awake wondering if a remark of hers had been misunderstood, and why a pair of guests left at a quarter past ten; she worked round and round her speculations with the family persistence; the habit remained but the edge had gone.

On this night at Haslingfield, though she kept saying every ten minutes: ‘Charles promised to ring up about coming down tomorrow. I’m getting into a state. It will be intolerable if he forgets’, it was nothing but the residue of the old habit.

At last the telephone bell rang in the hall, and the butler told her that Mr Charles was asking for her. Having seen her run to the telephone so many times, I found it strange to wait while she walked upright, slow, eight months gone.

Katherine returned and said that Charles was hoping to come down for dinner on the following night, but would have to get back to London to sleep. ‘Whether that’s because of his practice or Ann I couldn’t tell,’ she said. ‘I should think it’s because of Ann, shouldn’t you?’ Her face became thoughtful and hard. For a moment she looked set, determined, middle-aged. ‘That takes me back again to the first time you came here. You realize that I invited Ann specially for you, don’t you? I definitely hoped you’d make a match of it. I thought she might be attractive enough to distract you from Sheila. I never thought of her for Charles at all.’ She looked at me intently. ‘Well, Lewis, my dear, I believe my scheme might have been better for everyone. I know I oughtn’t to talk about Sheila, but you must realize that your friends hate to see her eating your life away. And on the other hand, if you had married Ann, you would have kept her in order. She wouldn’t have tried to make a different man of you as she’s tried with Charles. Yes, it would have been better if my scheme had come off.’

The warm, wet wind lashed round the house all Sunday, and I spent the whole day indoors. In the morning I talked for an hour with Mr March alone. He said that Philip was now convinced that the gossip had blown itself out, and accordingly did not consider it worth while to discuss ‘ancient history’ in the shape of the Howard & Hazlehurst dealings in 1929. Mr March was left apprehensive. I wished I could have told him that Ann and Charles had settled his worries. But I did say that there might be good news for him soon.

After lunch I sat in the library reading the file of the Note which I had brought down. The issues ran from the middle of 1935 to the week before; I read with attention, forgetting the beat of rain against the windows and the howl of the wind. I found nothing in the way of a financial accusation, except one tentative hint. But there was a series of facts, bits of personal information, quoted sayings, about people in the circles where Sir Philip moved, the circles of junior ministers, permanent secretaries, chairmen of large firms. Some of the facts I recognized, and I had heard some of the sayings: I knew them to be accurate.

I had tea brought up to the library, and went on reading. In some numbers it was not hard to guess which pieces of information Ann had brought in. Occasionally I thought I could see the hands of other acquaintances. I was making notes, for I thought there was no harm in being prepared when Katherine came in with Charles. ‘He’s just driven down through the wretched rain,’ she said. ‘I told him you’d been appallingly unsociable all afternoon.’

Charles came over to my chair and saw what I was reading. ‘I didn’t know he had such a passion for political information, did you?’ he said to Katherine.

He seemed quite untroubled.

‘Have you noticed,’ he asked me, ‘how many of their predictions actually come off?’

‘Too many,’ I said.

He turned to Katherine. ‘Ann does a good deal for it, did you realize that?’ He spoke casually, but with affection and pride.

‘I take the rag,’ said Katherine, ‘but I hadn’t the slightest idea.’

‘I don’t suppose you read it,’ Charles teased her. ‘Do you make Francis read it aloud in bed? Don’t you agree that’s the only way you ever read anything at all?’

Mr March had come into the room behind them.

‘I assume that your lucubrations have been completely disturbed by my family,’ he said to me. ‘I suggest that it would be considerably less sepulchral in the drawing-room. I don’t remember such a July since Hannah came to stay in 1912. She said that she wouldn’t have noticed the weather so much in her own house, but that didn’t prevent her from outstaying her invitation.’

There were only a few minutes before dinner when I could talk to Charles alone. No, he said, Ann had not yet appealed to Seymour. No, so far as Ann knew, the Note had not got any usable facts about Getliffe or anyone else. Yes, she would call the Note off for good and all; she was seeing Seymour next week; there was nothing to worry about.

All evening the talk was gay and friendly. Charles showed how glad he was to meet Katherine; he was demonstratively glad, more so than she. His manner to his father was easy, as though they had come together again after all that had happened — come together, not as closely as in the past, but on a new friendly footing where neither of them was making much demand. It was Charles’ wish that they should stay like this.

Mr March responded at dinner, more brilliantly even than when I last saw him and Charles together. It was the suspicious and realistic, I thought, who were most easy to reassure. It was the same in love: the extravagantly jealous sometimes needed only a single word to be transported into absolute trust.

Keeping up his liveliness, Mr March told a story of someone called Julian Baring, ‘a man I like very much if I am not under the obligation of meeting him’. Then I discovered at last the secret of Mr March’s Sunday night attire. The first time I went to Haslingfield, I had noticed with astonishment that on the Sunday night he wore a dinner jacket over his morning trousers and waistcoat. I had stayed there on a good many Sundays since, and I found this to be his invariable custom. Somehow I had never been able to enquire why, but this evening I did, and learned, through Mr March’s protestations, shouts, stories, and retorts to his children, that it was his way of lessening the servants’ Sunday work. The servants, as I knew, were always Gentiles. Mr March thought it proper that they should go to church on Sunday evening: and he felt that they would get there quicker if they had to put out only his jacket instead of a whole suit.

We went on talking of the March servants. All of them, like Mr March’s, were Gentiles. They moved from house to house within the family (for instance, Mr March’s butler had started as a footman in Sir Philip’s house). They seemed to become more snobbish about the family reputation than the Marches themselves. When Katherine married Francis, some of them protested to her maid — what a comedown it was! To them it was shameful that she had not made a brilliant match. They thought back with regret to the days when the March households had been full of opulent, successful guests. Mr March’s servants in particular could not forgive Charles and Katherine for bringing to Bryanston Square and Haslingfield no one but young men like Francis and myself, without connections, without wardrobes, instead of the titles, the money, the clothes, which brought a thrill into their lives and which they felt in a position to expect.

Most of these accounts came through Katherine’s maid. Mr March guffawed as he heard them, but with a nostalgia of his own.

We listened, as we could not help doing that month, to the nine o’clock news. When the items about the Spanish war had finished, Charles switched off the wireless and both he and I were silent. Mr March looked at us, becoming irascible as he saw our concern. He said loudly:

‘I say, a plague on both your houses.’

‘You don’t really say that,’ said Charles. ‘It wouldn’t be quite so dangerous if you did.’

‘I repeat,’ retorted Mr March, ‘it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

‘It’s as clear an issue,’ said Charles, ‘as we shall have in our time.’

‘You’re only indulging in this propaganda,’ cried Mr March, ‘because of the influence of your connections.’

‘No,’ I put in. ‘I should say exactly the same. I’m afraid I should, say more, Mr L. I believe this is only the beginning. The next ten or twenty years aren’t going to be pretty.’

‘You’re all succumbing to a bad attack of nerves,’ said Mr March.

Charles said with a grin: ‘I don’t think so. But remember I’ve got some reason to be nervous. If it does come to the barricades, Ann will insist, of course, on fighting herself. But she’ll also insist on making me fight too.’

Katherine and I laughed, but Mr March merely smiled with his lips. He was preoccupied; his voice, instead of being animated, went flat, as though the mind behind it was being dragged away, dragged from question to question. Charles rose to go. He said goodbye affectionately to his father, and very warmly to Katherine, whom he did not expect to see until her child was born; I went down with him to his car. It was still raining, and a wild night. Charles was in a hurry to get back home by midnight, as he had promised Ann. I mentioned that I wanted to have another word with her, and he said, casually and in entire friendliness, how much she would like that. Then he drove off. I stood for some moments watching the tail-lamp of his car dwindling down the drive.

The next day passed quietly until the late evening. The afternoon was a fine interval among the storms, and I walked in the grounds. When I returned for tea, I found a professional letter had just arrived, which occupied me for a couple of hours. I noticed, without giving it a second thought, that the same post had brought Katherine one or two letters, as well as her daily one from Francis.

After dinner, when we moved into the drawing-room, Katherine rested on a sofa. Mr March was talking to her about her children. Both of them gained satisfaction from providing against unlikely contingencies in the years ahead. The curtains were not drawn yet, the sky was still bright at ten o’clock. It was pleasant to bask there, listening to Mr March, while the short summer night began to fall.

Then Katherine remembered her afternoon mail.

‘The only letter I’ve opened is my husband’s,’ she said comfortably. ‘Being in this state makes me even more lazy than I usually am. Lewis, will you pander to my condition and fetch in the others?’

As I gave them to her, I saw that one was a long foolscap envelope, with her address in green typescript, and I realized that it was her weekly copy of the Note.

She read it last. I felt a flicker of uneasiness, nothing more, as she opened the sheets, and went on chatting to Mr March. Suddenly we heard Katherine’s voice, loud and harsh.

‘I think you ought to listen to this, Mr L.’

She read, angrily and deliberately:

‘“Armaments and Shares. As foreshadowed in Note (Mar. 24 ’36) certain personages close to Government appear interested in armaments programme in more ways than one. Hush-hush talk in Century (exclusive City luncheon club, HQ 22 Farringdon St), Jewish candidates quietly blackballed, president George Wyatt, co-director of Sir Horace (Cartel-spokesman) Timberlake — (see Note, Nov. 17 ’35, Feb. 2 ’36, Apr. 15 ’36), that heavy killings made through inside knowledge (official) armaments contracts, both ’35 (Abyssinian phoney scare) and ’29. E.g. ’29 Herbert Getliffe KC employed Jan. 2–June 6, advice WO contract Howard & Hazelhurst: £10,000 worth H & H bought name of G L Paul, May 30, £15,000 worth H & H F E Paul, June 2, G L and F E Paul brothers H Getliffe’s wife. Usual lurkman technique (see Note, Feb. 9 ’36). Have junior ministers, names canvassed in Century, also used lurkmen? Allow for Century’s anti-Semitism. But Note satisfied background hush-hush scandal. Story, transactions, dates, ministers, later.”’

The room was quiet. Then Mr March cried out: ‘My son has done this.’

Katherine said: ‘It’s an outrage. It must be Ann. Don’t you agree that it must be Ann? Charles told me that she wrote for them—’

Mr March said: ‘He must have known her intentions and he is responsible for it all. He is responsible for it all.’

I broke in: ‘I’m sure that is not true. God knows this is bad enough. But I’m sure neither of them knew it was coming. Charles knew nothing last night. Unless he’s read this thing today, he still knows nothing now.’

‘How can you speak for my son?’ Mr March shouted.

I said: ‘If he has done this he would have told you. He couldn’t have made himself speak to you as he did last night, if he knew this was on the way. It’s not in his nature.’

I had spoken with insistence, and Mr March sat silent, huddled in his chair, his chin sunk in his breast.

I had to go on speaking. I tried to explain, without making excuses for Ann, what had happened. I said that she was on the point of going to the Note and asking them to keep the story out. After the threat at the end of this piece, it was imperative to say nothing which might make it harder for her.

Mr March gave a sullen nod of acquiescence, but he was looking at me as though I were an enemy, not a friend.

He said: ‘I shall judge my son by his actions now. That is all that I can do.’

Katherine said: ‘This is her fault. She’s not content with crippling Charles. Now she’s trying to damage the rest of us. I wish to God she’d never set foot in this house.’

Mr March said quietly: ‘I wished that the first moment I saw her. I have never been able to forgive him for marrying her.’

34: Answer to an Appeal

As soon as I arrived back in London, I telephoned to Ann. She had already seen the issue, she said, and spoken to Seymour. He had guaranteed that nothing more would be published on the story for four weeks: he was himself going to Paris for a fortnight, picking up news, but he would be ready to discuss the problem with her as soon as he returned, and with Charles also if he liked to come along.

‘You’ll do it,’ I said, ‘the minute he gets back?’

‘Of course.’

‘He’s not putting you off while he slips something in?’

‘He wouldn’t do that to me.’ Her reply sounded constrained, on the defensive: she did not like my being so suspicious: she could feel that I suspected something else. I thought it more likely than not that Seymour had already got the first piece in without giving her a chance to see it. She resented any such thought: when she gave her trust, as she did to Seymour, she gave it without reserve. Yet she went on to ask me a favour: when she and Charles arranged the meeting with Seymour, would I come too? I was puzzled: what use could I be, I said. She stuck to it. She said, as was true, that I had given Seymour legal advice once or twice; on some things, she went on, he might listen to me.

When Seymour got back, he raised no objection. On the contrary, he rang up on the day they had fixed for the talk, and invited me himself, in his high-spirited, easy, patrician voice. I might even call for him after dinner at the Note office, he suggested.

So I duly climbed the five flights of stairs, in the murk and the smell of shavings and mildew. The Note office was at the top of a house just off the Charing Cross Road: on the other floors were offices of art photographers, dingy solicitors, something calling itself a trading company: on the fifth landing, in two rooms, was produced — not only edited but set up, duplicated, and distributed — the Note. In one of the rooms a light was burning, as Seymour’s secretary was still working there, at half past eight. She was working for nothing, as I knew, a prettyish girl with a restless smile. Humphrey (she enjoyed being in the swim, calling him by his Christian name) had been called away, she said, but he was expecting us all at his flat in Dolphin Square.

When at last I got there, he was alone. He was a short, cocky, confident man, nearly bald, although he was no older than Charles; he was singularly ugly, with a mouth so wide that it gave him a touch of the grotesque. His manner was warm and amiable. He put a drink into my hand and led me outside on to the terrace; his flat was high up in the building, and from the terrace one could look down over all western London, the roofs shining into the sunset. But Seymour did not look down: he did not refer to why I was there: he just launched, with a kind of obsessive insistence mixed with his habitual jauntiness, into what he had been hearing in Paris, whom he had seen, what he had been learning about the Spanish war. When I made a remark, he kept up a sighing noise which indicated that he had more to say.

At last I managed to get in my own preoccupation. He was an easy man to be off-hand with, because he was so off-hand and confident himself. I said: ‘What about this campaign?’

‘What campaign?’

‘The one that Ann March and Charles are coming about.’

‘Oh that.’ He gave a gnome-like grin.

‘Why did you start on Philip March at all?’

‘Do you think we’re really interested in him?’ said Seymour with cheerful contempt. ‘He’s never been more than a city figurehead. No, the chaps we’re really interested in are Hawtin and his pals. I think we might be able to put them on the spot, don’t you?’

I asked him — what facts had he really got hold of? About Philip March? About Hawtin? What facts were there, beside those about the Getliffe dealings?

Seymour grinned again, but did not answer. Instead he said: ‘Should you say old March cut any ice among that gang?’ (‘That gang’ meant the people who had the real power, the rulers, the establishment: Seymour, like other communists I knew, had a habit of breaking into a curious kind of slang: from him, in his cultivated tone, it sounded odd.)

‘That’s the sort of thing you know,’ I said.

‘Hawtin’s quite a different cup of tea,’ said Seymour. ‘Now he does cut some ice, and if we get his blood the rest of the gang will feel it, won’t they now?’

I asked again, what facts had he got about Hawtin? And when was the next instalment due to appear? To the second question, he gave a straight answer. Not for some weeks. They were not ready yet. If they had to delay for months rather than weeks, he might repeat what he had already printed — ‘just to remind some of our friends that we’re still thinking about them.’

It was the same answer as he had given to Ann: so there was time, I thought. Meanwhile, as we waited for Ann and Charles, Seymour went on talking, dismissing the ‘Hawtin racket’, elated and obsessed by ‘stories’ which, to him, mattered out of comparison more.

Below us, the haze of London was changing from blue to grey as night fell, and through the haze the lights were starting out. From second to second a new light quivered through, now in the Pimlico streets beneath us, now on the skyline. Soon there was a galaxy of lights. It made me think of the press of human lives, their struggles and their peace.

The bell of Seymour’s flat rang, and on his way to open the door he switched on his own lights. Outside in the passage were standing Ann and Charles. Seymour grinned up at Charles.

‘Late bill,’ he said. It was a recognition-symbol, a token of their days at school: I had heard Seymour use it before as a kind of upper-class password.

As we sat down, all of us except Seymour were unrelaxed: but he, just as confidently as he had done with me, started talking: his trip, the ‘low-down’ which he had collected, he went on just as with me. It took Ann an effort to say: ‘Look, Humphrey, do you mind if we get this over!’

Her voice was tight. I could feel how much she respected him. On his side, he was at once polite and considerate. ‘Of course, we’d better if you want to,’ he said with a kind, friendly, praising smile.

‘I think I’ve got to bring up this Philip March story,’ she said.

‘Right,’ said Seymour.

Though she looked strained, she began her appeal with extreme lucidity. It was agreed by everyone, wasn’t it, she said, that Philip March had had nothing whatever to do with any recent dealings? Seymour nodded his head. Philip March was absolutely in the clear, she said; last year’s rumours had nothing to do with him? Seymour nodded. If she herself hadn’t brought in the name of Herbert Getliffe, and an almost forgotten piece of gossip, no one would have remotely considered any smear against Philip March?

‘Absolutely true,’ said Seymour. ‘I was just telling Lewis, he never seriously counted, with all due respect to your family, Charles.’

He was sitting back with one leg crossed over the other. For all his cockiness and the tincture of the grotesque, he was a man in whom one could feel authority. It was an authority that did not come just from his commitment, from his position in the party: it was the authority of his nature. Even Charles, leaning forward on the sofa, watching him with hard eyes, paid attention to it. Certainly Ann, more given than Charles to admit authority in others, recognized it. She sat with her backbone straight as a guardsman’s by Charles’ side, and said: ‘Well then, I shouldn’t ask for anything impossible. I shouldn’t ask to call off anything that was important. But it isn’t important, is it? I didn’t even know that anyone would think it worth while to revive the Getliffe business. I should have thought it was too long ago to count. I should have thought whatever Philip March did or didn’t do at that time, it was too long ago to count. And anyway it’s more obscure than the Getliffe business, we couldn’t get it cut and dried. I think there would be pretty strong arguments for leaving him alone, in any case. But of course we want him left alone because it’s bound to affect my husband’s family. It’s not often that one can ask for special treatment, is it? I think I can, this time.’

Seymour smiled at her, and said: ‘There isn’t any such thing as private news, is there?’

She repeated ‘I think I can, this time’, because his tone was so light that it did not sink in. It took her seconds to realize that he had turned her down flat.

Charles had realized at once. In a harsh and angry voice he said: ‘You admit that you’ve got no foundation at all for any scandal last year — as far as my uncle is concerned. You admit the same about Herbert Getliffe, don’t you? Is there any foundation for the scandal at all, even about this man Hawtin? Or are you just wishing that it happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Seymour.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘Precisely what I say.’

Bitterly Charles went on with his questions. About 1935 there was nothing proved or provable at all: it seemed most likely that there was nothing in the rumour. But, as Seymour said jauntily, the 1929 dealings were on the record — the transactions of Getliffe’s brothers-in-law and, as he hoped to demonstrate, those of Philip March.

‘You’re proposing to use those, in fact,’ said Charles, ‘to give a bit of credibility to a sheer lie?’

‘That’s putting it rather more strongly than I should myself. If there was jiggery-pokery some years ago, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t have been some last year.’

‘But you’re really pretty certain that there wasn’t?’

Seymour shrugged his shoulders.

‘I must say,’ said Charles, ‘it’s more dishonest even than I thought.’

‘I shan’t have time for your moral sensitivity,’ said Seymour, his voice suddenly as passionate as Charles’, ‘until we’ve beaten the fascists and got a decent world.’

In the angry silence I put in: ‘If you’re seriously proposing to print rumours without even a scrap of evidence, the paper isn’t going to last very long, is it?’

‘Why in God’s name not?’

‘What’s going to stop a crop of libel actions?’

‘The trouble with you lawyers,’ said Seymour, jaunty once more, ‘is that you never know when a fact is a fact, and you never see an inch beyond your noses. I am prepared to bet any of you, or all three if you like, an even hundred pounds that no one, no one, brings an action against us over this business. Trust old Father Mouse and bob’s your uncle.’

He went on, enjoying himself: ‘While I’m about it, I’m prepared to bet you that the paper never runs into a libel action. You trust old Father Mouse. I’m nothing like as wild and woolly as I seem. No, the only thing that could ever finish the paper is that we might come up against the Official Secrets Act. That’s the menace, and if we had bad luck that would be the end. I don’t suppose I’m telling any of you anything you don’t know. Anyway, Ann’s seen how we collect some of our stuff and she must have enough documents in her own desk to finish the poor old paper off in a couple of hours.’

It sounded like an indiscretion, like a piece of his cocksureness. Listening, I believed it was the opposite. He had done it deliberately. He was not the man to underestimate just how competent and ruthless other people could be. He took it for granted that Ann and Charles knew that she had it in her power to kill the paper; he took it for granted too, that, after his refusal, having no other conceivable way to protect Charles’ family, they would consider it.

He knew her well. It would have been stupid to hide anything, it was good tactics to bring the temptation into the open, brandish it in front of her and defy her with it. He knew, of course, that she was as much committed to the party as he was himself. Outside her marriage, it was her one devotion. It was so much a devotion — only a religious person could know something similar in kind, perhaps — that she had not been shocked when Seymour admitted that he was fabricating a set of scandals. To Charles, it was a moral outrage. To her, so upright in her own dealings, it was not. Any more, oddly enough, than it was to Seymour himself. Both she and Seymour were believers by nature. At times it gave them a purity and innocence that men like Charles never knew: at times it gave Seymour, and perhaps even Ann, a capacity to do things from which Charles, answering to his own conscience, would have been repelled.

As Seymour told Ann that she could ruin the paper next day, I watched her glance at Charles. Their faces were set, but their eyes met with recognition, with understanding.

They left soon after. I stayed behind, so that they could talk alone the minute they got outside.

Seymour did not say another word about them, or the paper. He had the knack of turning off his attention with a click, as though he had pressed a switch. He did not make a comment. Instead, cheerful and unflagging, he insisted on driving me to White’s for a night-cap. There, just for once, his cocksureness let him down. A member whom I faintly knew brought in a guest of distinguished appearance. I asked Seymour who he was.

‘Oh, that’s Lord Kilmainham,’ he said, with supreme confidence.

It was not. Enquiring a little later in the lavatory, I found that the guest was an income-tax accountant.

35: The Future of Two Old Men

Since the first instalment in the Note, Charles and Mr March had not met nor spoken to each other. Charles had, however, telephoned to Katherine after the visit to Seymour. He had told her, so I gathered, that Ann had done her best to call the paper off. Whether either Katherine or Mr March believed this, I had no means of judging. But they knew I had been present. Within a few days I received a letter from Mr March, telling me that he needed my ‘friendly assistance’: would I lunch with him at his club, so that we could go together to Sir Philip’s office afterwards.

The club servants were surprised to see Mr March there in the month of August, having got used to the clockwork regularity of his life; he had not left Haslingfield during his summer stay for twenty years. Just as, though he went to the club for tea each day he was in London, he had not lunched there since Charles was a child. He did not know where or how to write his order, and had to be helped by the servants. They teased him for it: he, usually so uncondescending, was gruff with them.

He said little at the meal. We had a table to ourselves, but those round us were soon filled. I saw one or two faces I knew, all of civil servants from the departments close by. I felt that Mr March, unable to talk of the bitter anxiety in his mind, was also depressed because he recognized so few. There were only two men he nodded to, and they were very old.

In Pall Mall, on our way to Sir Philip’s ministry, he tried to rouse himself from his gloom. We turned into St James’s Park towards Whitehall, and Mr March looked over the trees at the dome of the India Office, the roofs and towers, all soft and opal grey in the moist sunlight.

‘I must say,’ he remarked, ‘that it looks comparatively presentable. But I have never been able to understand the fascination which makes my brother Philip and others wish to spend their entire lives in this neighbourhood. I once said as much to Hannah, and she replied that it was sour grapes on my part. No doubt I was envious on account of my failure to cut any kind of figure in the world. Nevertheless, Lewis, if I hadn’t been a failure, and had been given my choice of where to have a reasonable success, I should not have chosen this particular neighbourhood.’

His face darkened in a scowl of misery and anger. ‘But my brother Philip did. I cannot endure the thought that, because of these happenings, he may find it harder to continue here.’

In the ministry we were led down the corridors to the office of Sir Philip’s secretary, who was a youngish man called Williams, smooth-faced, spectacled, dressed for his job in black coat and striped trousers, and full of self-importance in it. ‘I will go and find out when the Parliamentary Secretary will be free,’ he said, enjoying the chance to bring out his master’s appellation. He came back promptly and announced: ‘The Parliamentary Secretary will be glad to see you at once.’

We went through the inside door, and Sir Philip came across his room to meet us. He shook hands with Mr March, then said ‘How do you do?’ to me with his stiff, furrowed smile. As he sat down at his desk by the window which overlooked the park, I saw that his skin had taken on a yellowness, a matt texture, such as one sometimes sees in ageing men. He was seventy-three, only three years older than Mr March, but in the bright summer light the difference looked much greater.

‘I expect you’re dying of drought as usual at Haslingfield,’ Sir Philip began their ritual of brotherly baiting. ‘The country is under water everywhere else.’

‘I regard the rainfall as having been reasonable for once,’ said Mr March. ‘And I am pleased to report that I have sufficient water for my requirements.’

These exchanges went on for a few moments. They had made them for so many years, and Sir Philip at least could not let go of them now: Mr March’s replies were forced and mechanical. Sir Philip was, as the afternoon began, by far the less perturbed of the two. Soon he said: ‘I suppose we must get down to business. I should like to say, Eliot, that I am obliged to you for giving me your time. I should be glad to regard it as a professional service, of course, but my brother informs me that you are certain to prefer it otherwise. I appreciate your feelings and, as I say, I am obliged to you. I think you know some of the facts of this affair. In May there was some gossip about myself and some of my colleagues. We were alleged to have used our official knowledge during the past twelve months to buy holdings in companies where government contracts were soon going to be laid. This gossip also included some names outside the government, one of them being that fellow Getliffe. It has now been published, or at least a first instalment has. I believe you’ve seen it?’

I nodded.

‘I can answer for myself and my colleagues,’ Sir Philip went on. ‘So far as we are concerned, there’s not a word of truth in it. When I came back into the Government last year, I decided to spend the rest of my life being as useful to the country as I could, if they wanted me. It was a sacrifice, but I believe that some of us have got to accept responsibility. These aren’t easy years to hold responsibility: I needn’t tell you that.’

Even Sir Philip, I was thinking, could not avoid the expressions of convention, talked about ‘sacrifice’, perhaps used the word to himself — even Sir Philip, who was not a humbug but a hard and realistic man, who loved office and power and knew that he loved it.

‘I was prepared to make the sacrifice,’ Sir Philip went on. ‘I had to resign my directorships when I became a minister, naturally. I also decided to finish with all speculation. I’ve already told Leonard this.’ He glanced at Mr March.

‘I acknowledged your assurance,’ said Mr March, ‘on hearing it at your bedside during your period of incapacity owing to gout.’

‘I finished with it,’ said Sir Philip. ‘I am not a rich man, of course, but I can get along. I have not taken part in any single transaction since I entered the government last November. I cannot make such a categorical statement for my colleagues whose names have been bandied about, but I’m completely satisfied that they are clear.’

‘You mentioned people outside the government,’ I broke in. ‘I’m also satisfied in the same way about Getliffe.’

‘You mean he’s bought nothing in the last twelve months?’

‘Nothing that could be thought suspicious.’

‘What evidence are you going on?’

‘Nothing as definite as yours,’ I said. ‘But I’ve talked to him on this actual point, and I know him well.’

‘I reported Lewis Eliot’s observations on this matter,’ said Mr March.

Sir Philip’s eyes were bright and alert. ‘You’re convinced about this fellow Getliffe?’

‘Quite convinced,’ I said.

‘I accept that,’ said Sir Philip. ‘And it makes me certain that the whole campaign is a put-up job and there’s no backing to it at all.’

Mr March, who had been listening with painful attention, showed no relief as he heard these words. He looked at his brother, with an expression stupefied, harassed, distressed.

‘That being so,’ I said, ‘your solicitors are telling you to go ahead with a libel action, aren’t they?’

‘It’s not quite so easy,’ Sir Philip replied without hesitation, in a tone as authoritative as before. I admired his hard competence. Professionally, I thought, he would have been an ideal client. ‘They’ve tied up this affair with certain other transactions. The other transactions are supposed to have happened when I was in the government in 1929. You will notice that, in the case of Getliffe, they have taken care to tie these two allegations together. It is clever of them. I detest their politics, I’ve no use for their general attitude, and if I can put them in their place, I shall — but we mustn’t imagine that we are dealing with fools.’

‘I have never thought so,’ said Mr March.

‘If they go ahead with these allegations about last year, I should win a libel action, shouldn’t I?’ Sir Philip asked me.

‘Without the slightest doubt,’ I said.

‘I should also do myself more harm than good,’ he went on.

I was thinking how precisely Seymour had calculated the risk.

‘There happens to be some substance in what they say about 1929,’ said Sir Philip.

We waited for him to go on.

‘I may say at once that I’ve done nothing which men of decent judgement could think improper. But one step I took in good faith which these people may twist against me. I am very much to blame for giving them such a handle. I’ve always thought it was not only essential to be honest: it was also essential to seem honest. I take all the blame for not seeing further than my nose. That is the only blame I am disposed to take.’

He paused, and gave a sardonic chuckle.

‘I should like to distinguish my actions from Getliffe’s quite sharply. In 1929 Getliffe made a disgraceful use of information he had acquired professionally. In my judgement, there is no question of it. He knew the government were giving a contract to Howard & Hazlehurst. He used catspaws to buy a fair-sized block of shares. He must have done very well out of it. Howard & Hazlehurst were down to 9s. in 1929: they stand at 36s. today.’

‘Thirty-six and sixpence,’ said Mr March, as though by sheer habit.

‘Getliffe is a twister and I shouldn’t have the faintest compunction about going ahead with a libel action if it only meant involving him. If he were disbarred, I should simply consider that he had brought it on himself. He’s downright dishonest, and I was sorry that you’ — he turned to Mr March — ‘permitted Katherine to marry into the fellow’s family. Though I’ve always liked Francis from the little I’ve seen of him.’

Mr March burst out, in violent and excessive anger: ‘I refuse to accept that criticism at the present juncture. My son-in-law has made an excellent husband for my daughter Katherine in all respects. I refused at the time to penalize them on account of his regrettable connections, and I still refuse, despite the fact that Herbert Getliffe’s name is linked with yours in these deplorable circumstances. I refuse to accept this preposterous criticism. If other marriages in my family had been as sound as my daughter’s, we should not be troubled with the discussion on which we are supposed to be engaged.’

Sir Philip seemed to understand his brother’s rage.

‘Yes, Leonard,’ he said, with an awkward, constrained affection. ‘But you can appreciate that Getliffe isn’t my favourite character just at present, can’t you?’ His tone became once more efficient, organized, businesslike. ‘My own activities were considerably different from that fellow’s. I only spent a few months in the government in 1929, you may remember, but of course I knew of the Howard & Hazlehurst contract, and of course I knew of the trend of policy about armaments. Naturally I thought over the implications, which appeared to suggest that, even at the height of disarmament, certain types of weapon would still have to be developed. So certain firms connected with those types of weapon would flourish for the next few years. That wasn’t a foolish piece of reasoning, and I felt entitled to act on it. If one struck lucky, one had a good buy. I looked round at various firms. I found one which was in fairly low water, and I backed my guess. The shares were down somewhere that didn’t matter, and I put in a fairish sum of money. My guess came off, but I should have preferred it otherwise. For this firm was bought by Howard & Hazlehurst three months after I had put my money in. I had no conceivable foreknowledge of that transaction. I did very well out of it, from the nature of the case. So did one or two of my colleagues, who sometimes follow my guidance in financial matters. It’s apparent that an ugly construction would be put on our actions — and these people are putting it. The facts are as I have stated them.’

He looked at Mr March and me in turn.

‘I know there are silly persons who, without imputing motives, would still think that what Getliffe and I did were very much the same. I find those silly persons both tiresome and stupid. The point is that Getliffe acted in a way which the rules don’t permit, while I kept strictly inside them. That is the only point. There are no absolute principles in these matters. There are simply rules on which all financial dealings depend. If you upset them, you upset the whole structure. If the rules go, then confidence and stability go. That is why I should show no mercy to anyone who breaks them. I should be sorry to see Getliffe escape scot-free.’

He added: ‘It would not have occurred to me to break the rules. I blame myself for giving the appearance of having done so. I have had a long life in these matters, and I have never taken part in a transaction of which I am ashamed. The only thing left is to stop this business before it goes further. I want to ask you whether that is in our power.’

His conscience was clear, his self-respect untouched. Mr March had reported, after visiting him when ill, that his brother was ‘sick in mind’; but it was not through any inner conflict. He was certain of his integrity. Yet he was desperately taxed. He was an old man, threatened with humiliation. In his hard, simple, strong-willed fashion he had coiled himself up to meet the danger. Throughout the afternoon he had kept his authority. But as he asked ‘whether that is in our power’ his face was shrunken: he still controlled his tone, but he looked imploring.

I saw that Mr March was stricken by this change. All through the afternoon, he had been torn by a sorrow his brother did not know; but even without that, he would still have flinched from the sight of Philip turning to him for pity and help. It had been painful to him to see the first traces of Philip’s anxiety, when he was ill: it was worse now. For Philip had been the hero of his childhood, the brother who did all that he would have liked to do, the brother who had none of his timidities, who was self-sufficient, undiffident, effective: it was intolerable to see him weak. It filled Mr March with revulsion, even with anger against Philip.

Mr March said in a low voice to his brother: ‘As I’ve already told you, whether it is in our power or not depends on my son’s wife.’

‘I still don’t believe it,’ said Sir Philip.

‘Will you tell my brother whether she’s responsible for this, or not?’ said Mr March to me.

‘How much do you know about this?’ Sir Philip asked me.

‘Have you told Sir Philip,’ I asked Mr March, ‘that she’s tried to set it right?’

‘I remain to be convinced of that,’ said Mr March.

‘I assure you.’

‘All I can do,’ said Mr March, ‘is acknowledge your remark.’

‘Why are you making it worse than it need be?’ I cried. I explained as much as I was free to do of her share in the story, and of how she had made her plea to Seymour and been refused. As I was speaking, Sir Philip’s face was lighter, more ready to credit what I said, than his brother’s, which was set in an obstinate, incredulous frown. Yet at last Mr March said, as though reluctantly:

‘Apparently she has expressed some concern.’

I repeated part of what I had said. All of a sudden he shouted: ‘Do you deny that if she wished she could still stop this abomination?’

I hesitated. Yes, she could inform against the Note. She could finish it for good. The loyalties that she would have to betray went through my mind, inhibiting my answer. The hesitation made me seem less straightforward than I was really being. Mr March shouted: ‘Do you deny it?’

‘It’s possible, but—’

‘Lewis Eliot knows very well,’ Mr March said to Sir Philip, ‘that it’s more than possible.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s only possible by a way that no one would like to use. I don’t think many people could do it.’

‘Can you explain yourself?’ said Sir Philip.

I had to shake my head.

‘I should be breaking a confidence,’ I said.

‘At any rate,’ said Sir Philip, ‘I can take it that this is all part and parcel of her cranky behaviour?’

‘In a sense, yes.’ I said I could not add to that answer.

Sir Philip became brisk, almost relieved. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that is the best news I’ve heard today. Charles must bring her to heel. I’ve always thought it was scandalous for him to let her indulge in this nonsense. Particularly a young woman as good-looking as she is. He ought to keep her busier himself.’ Into the yellowing parchment face there came a smile, appreciative and salacious. It might have been a flicker of himself as a younger man, the Philip who had an eye for the women, the Philip who, so the family gossip said, had kept a string of mistresses.

‘I cannot let you delude yourself,’ said Mr March.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are inclined to think the position is less dangerous because my son’s wife is responsible for it.’

The weight of Mr March’s words told on Sir Philip.

He replied irritably: ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at. I’ve always heard that the young woman is devoted to Charles.’

‘I have no reason to believe the contrary.’

‘Then she’ll do what he tells her, in the end.’

There was a silence, Mr March cried: ‘I cannot answer for what my son will tell her.’

‘You’re not being reasonable.’ Sir Philip’s tone was harassed and sharp. ‘Charles has always had decent feelings for me, hasn’t he? You’ve only got to let him know that this is serious for me. If they go on far enough, they may make it impossible for me to stay in public life. Well then. Be as considerate as you can, and tell him none of us would interfere with his wife’s activities as a general rule, though he might take it from me that she should have something better to do with her time. But tell him this is too important for me and the family for us to be delicate. We must ask him to’ assert himself.’

‘You don’t know how much you’re asking,’ I broke out.

‘If the thing’s possible, it’s got to be done,’ said Sir Philip.

‘I will make those representations,’ said Mr March. ‘But I cannot answer for the consequences.’

‘If you prefer it,’ said Sir Philip, ‘I am quite prepared to speak to Charles.’

‘No, Philip,’ Mr March said. ‘I must do it myself.’

Sir Philip stared at him, and then said: ‘I’m not willing to leave anything to chance. I expect Charles to act immediately.’

He looked at his brother for agreement, but Mr March barely moved his head in acquiescence.

‘I shouldn’t like to go out under a cloud,’ said Sir Philip. ‘Of course, we’ve all got to go some time, but no one likes being forced out.’ Suddenly his tone altered, and he said quickly: ‘Mind you, I’m not ready to admit that my usefulness is over yet. I’ve some pieces of work in this department I want to carry through, and after that—’

Inexplicably his mood had changed, and he began to talk of his expectations. He hoped to keep his office for six months, until there was a reshuffle in the government; he speculated on the reshuffle name by name, knowing this kind of politics just as he knew the March family. If one combination came off, he might still get a minor ministry for himself. For that he was hoping.

It was strange to hear him that afternoon. It was stranger still to hear Mr March, after a time, join in. Preoccupied, with occasional silences, he nevertheless joined in, and they forecast the chances of Sir Philip’s acquaintances, among them Holford’s son. Lord Holford — to whose party Charles had taken me years before — had a son whom he was trying to manoeuvre into a political success. Both Sir Philip and Mr March were anxious to secure that he did not get so much as a parliamentary private secretaryship.

It was strange to listen to them. No one, it seemed to me, had the power continuously to feel old. There were moments, many of them, when a man as realistic as Mr March was menaced by the grave — as in the club that afternoon, when he saw that his contemporaries were decrepit men. But those moments did not last. There were others, as now, when Sir Philip and Mr March could fear, could hope, just as they would have feared and hoped thirty years before. They were making plans at that moment: Sir Philip at seventy-three was still hoping for a ministry. There was no incongruity to himself: he hoped for it exactly as a young man would. The griefs and hopes of Mr March or Sir Philip might seem to an outsider softened and pathetic, because of the man’s age: but to the man himself, age did not matter, they were simply the griefs and hopes of his own timeless self.

36: Either/Or

After the talk with Sir Philip, Mr March went straight back to Haslingfield. He made no attempt that afternoon to get into touch with Charles; it was several days before he wrote to him. I heard from Katherine that a letter had at last been sent — a noncommittal letter, she gathered, just asking Charles down. We were struck by the procrastination.

Meanwhile, Ann and Charles, in a state when they wished to see no one but each other, did not know what she should do. It was either/or, and whichever she did there was not a tolerable way out.

She did not need to tell Charles what it would be like to betray all she believed in. In fact, I got an impression that they did not talk much about what each feared most, they were too close for that. When I was with them, the discussion was oddly matter-of-fact. If she should decide that the less detestable course was to get the paper stopped, what was the quickest way of doing it? She asked the question without expression. It was not difficult to give practical answers. She possessed, as Seymour had said in his defiant bluff, documents which would do the job: she had only to pass them to someone like Ronald Porson, and an injunction would be out within a few hours.

Charles went down to Haslingfield with nothing settled between them, but resolved to speak intimately and affectionately to his father. None of us knew precisely what was said at that meeting, but it did not go like that. All the news I had came from Katherine, who was, without any qualification at all, on Mr March’s side. She felt nothing but hostility to Ann: she had only a residue of sympathy, the faintest residue from the past, for Charles. Yet even she admitted that Mr March had made it more bitter for himself and his son with each word he said. He had never shown less control or less understanding of Charles. He seemed to have exemplified the law of nature according to which, when a human relation has gone profoundly wrong, one is driven to do anything that can make it worse.

Mr March, having delayed for so many days in seeing his son at all, received him with a storm of accusations. He insisted that Charles had deliberately dissimulated, had professed ignorance, had given lying reassurances, whenever Mr March had asked. Charles was outraged. He had gone to see his father with a feeling of guilt: he was in one of those situations where one is half-guilty and half-innocent, or rather guilty at one level and innocent at another. He deserved reproaches, he was forming them against himself — but he was maddened at being accused of behaviour he could never have committed.

Katherine believed that there had been the bitterest words about Ann. It seemed, very strangely, that Mr March had spoken of her as though she were just a slave of Charles’, not an independent human being. What had really been said no one knew but themselves.

They parted in anger, Mr March’s wildly possessing him, Charles’ hard and strained. But as he went without a goodbye, Charles, still not knowing where to turn in spite of his harsh replies, offered to see Mr March again when he returned to Bryanston Square. It was an attempt to keep a card of re-entry, such as one makes when one is not prepared to face an end. Violently and ungraciously, Mr March accepted it.

The second reference in the Note was published before the end of August. It went just as Seymour had told me; in itself, it was innocuous. It produced no more facts, hinted at Hawtin as the chief figure in the case, contained nothing which pointed specifically at Sir Philip, and ended by promising to produce the whole story in ‘three — four weeks’.

There were no consequences, at any rate none in the open. I heard some gossip, went to a political dinner party and listened to the hostess moving pieces about the chessboard. Did this mean that Alex Hawtin would soon have a brilliant future behind him? Would there be a reshuffle in the government before long? Would they take the opportunity to put one or two men ‘out’? But I was used to that kind of gossip, in which reputations rose and fell in a week: however informed the gossips were, however shrewd, their judgements had a knack of reversing themselves when one was not looking, and next month they would, with equal excitement, malice, and human gusto, be deciding that Alex Hawtin was safely ‘in’ and that someone else had ‘blotted his copybook’.

In the March family, nothing happened for some days: except that Mr March closed Haslingfield and, breaking his seasonal ritual by a fortnight, which had not happened since he took the house forty years before, was back in Bryanston Square by the first week in September. It was known that he had seen the second article, but he said nothing and made no attempt to have another private talk with Charles. In fact, the only action he took as soon as he returned to Bryanston Square was a singular one: he invited Charles and Ann, his niece Margaret March, and several others, including me, to dine with him, on the pretext that he wished to celebrate the birth of Katherine’s child.

The child, her second son, had been born a week before Mr March moved back to London. With all his physical exuberance he rejoiced in a birth. He was pleased that Katherine should have called the child after him. But no one believed that this was the true reason for his invitation. Margaret March, who knew most of the facts, thought he was making the opportunity for a scene with Ann: she was nervous at having to be a spectator, although her sympathies were mainly with Mr March.

Others of his relations believed much the same. They knew that a disaster hung over Mr March and Charles, and they felt that Mr March could not endure it any longer. Several of them were apprehensive enough to make excuses not to go. Most of them had learned something of the situation, pitied Mr March, and took his side; this was the case even with the younger generation. They did not begin to understand Charles’ position, though he attracted a kind of baffled sympathy from some, simply because he was liked and respected. Ann got no sympathy at all.

Ann herself had no doubt of the reason behind Mr March’s invitation. I called at Antrobus Street on my way home one night, just after we had all received the letters asking us to dine; I found Ann alone. For the first time in the years I had known her, her courage would not answer her. She was trying to screw up her will, but she was frightened.

I tried to hearten her. I said that it was possible Mr March had invited us for a much simpler reason. He might want to prove that he had not yet broken with his son. When Charles left Haslingfield, he had shown his card of re-entry and now perhaps Mr March was playing to it.

It did not sound likely. When Charles came in, I saw that she was not only frightened, but torn, just as Charles himself was torn. With her he was tender and protective. It was clear that he had not made her choice for her, and that he was not prepared to.

Nevertheless, that night I believed that, however much he kept from forcing her, however much he respected her choice, she would do as he wanted. I believed it more positively when she mentioned Mr March’s invitation, and said that she did not want to go.

‘When did it arrive?’ said Charles quietly.

‘This morning. It’s too much of an ordeal, and it couldn’t do any good. Even if I did go, it couldn’t do any good.’

Charles paused and said: ‘I’m afraid that I want you to.’

‘Why do you?’ Her face was open, but hurt and clouded.

‘You must see why. He’s made an approach, and I can’t refuse him. I’m afraid that I want you to go.’

‘Must I?’ said Ann.

‘Yes,’ said Charles.

37: ‘We’re Very Similar People’

Ann asked me to call for her on the night of Mr March’s dinner party. She had been away from home for some nights, and had not seen Charles since she got back; he had an engagement at his old hospital, and would have to go to Bryanston Square direct.

As soon as I caught sight of her I was troubled. She was dressed for the party, as though she had determined to look her best that night. But it was not her dress that took my eye. Her cheeks were flushed; on her forehead there was a frown of strain. At first I took it for granted that these were signs of anxiety because of the evening ahead; then I asked if she were well.

‘I’ve got a cold, I think,’ said Ann. ‘I felt it coming on a day or two ago. It’s nothing much.’

‘Any temperature?’

‘Perhaps a little,’ said Ann.

‘Does Charles know?’

‘No. I told you, I’ve not seen him since I went away.’

‘Wouldn’t it be wiser if you didn’t come?’

‘Do you think,’ Ann said, ‘that I could possibly not come now? I’ve told Mr March that I shall be there, haven’t I?’

Suddenly I was reminded of her making herself play on at tennis, her first afternoon at Haslingfield.

‘I must make sure that no one takes any notice, though,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if anything can be done about it.’ She went upstairs, and was some time away. At last she came into the room, halted in front of me, and said: ‘How will that do?’

She had gone over her make-up, hiding the flush on her cheeks, overpainting her lips. One thing alone she could not wipe away, and that was the constricted, strained expression round her eyes.

‘You look very pretty,’ I said. In our long, comradely acquaintanceship, I had scarcely paid her a compliment before.

She smiled with pleasure. She was vainer than one thought, she distrusted her looks more. She studied herself in the looking-glass over the fireplace. She gave another smile, faint, approving, edged with self-regard.

‘I think it will do,’ she said.

Again I tried to make her stay at home, but she would not listen.

The September night was fresh, and Ann shivered in the taxi. As we stood on the steps in Bryanston Square just before eight o’clock, the smell of fallen leaves in the garden was blown on the sharp wind. Even for myself, I wished that the evening was over.

In the drawing-room, Margaret March and a cousin whom I scarcely knew were sitting by the fire. Ann began to talk to the cousin, who was a shy, gauche youth of twenty. Margaret said to me quietly: ‘I don’t think anyone else is coming. And I accepted before I heard what was happening. Otherwise I think I should have got out of it. Perhaps it would have been behaving grossly, but still—’

Then Charles entered, and she became silent. Before any of us had spoken again, Mr March followed his son into the room.

He felt the silence. He looked at Charles, at Ann, and then at the rest of us. At last he shook hands with Ann in a stiff, constrained manner, and said: ‘I’m glad to have your company on this occasion. I’m glad that you were not prevented from attending.’

Through dinner, he went on as though trying not to disappoint us. He showed no sign of working up to a scene.

He knew he was expected to show pleasure at the birth, and he tried to act it. He talked of Katherine’s children and Katherine herself. He made an attempt, as it were mechanically, to recall the times when ‘my daughter had previously made a frightful ass of herself’.

Everyone at the table knew what he was doing. It was no relief to laugh at the jokes. I could not keep from looking at Charles, whose own glance came back time and again to his father. And I could not keep from looking at Ann; once I noticed Charles anxiously watching her. Glancing often from one to the other, I had to maintain more than my share of the conversation, replying to Mr March’s mechanical chaff.

Margaret March helped, but the cousin was too shy to speak. In that way we got through dinner, though there was one incident, quite trivial, which chilled us all. Mr March’s knife slipped as he was cutting his meat; as he righted himself he knocked his claret glass over. We heard the tinkle, watched the stain seep over the cloth, expecting at any instant that Mr March’s usual extravagant stream-of-consciousness grumbling would begin. But he said nothing. He stared at the cloth while the butler dried it up. He did not make a single complaint to save his face.

In the drawing-room, Mr March again attempted to behave as though this were nothing but a celebration. He told Margaret a story at my expense; as he developed it, he became less preoccupied. Then Margaret March made a tactless remark. For she talked about Katherine’s children, and said, casually but wistfully: ‘If I married, I wonder if I should dare to have a child. I don’t suppose I shall have the chance now, worse luck: but I wonder if I should.’

She was getting on into the mid-thirties. I looked at her handsome face, fair and clean-cut.

She added quietly: ‘Of course, I know that really I should do the same as Katherine. I should want children, I should start a family. But it would worry me. I’m not sure that it would be wise.’

‘Yes,’ said Ann, breaking from her silence with feverish intensity. ‘Of course you’d have children, of course you would.’

Mr March stared at her. Then he turned away to Margaret March.

‘I am not certain that I understand your suggestion,’ he said.

She hesitated: ‘I mean — when you think of what the world may be.’

Mr March shouted: ‘You need not try to respect my feelings. I am not accustomed to having my feelings respected in more important matters. I suppose you mean the world may not be a tolerable place for people of our religion?’

Margaret March nodded.

Mr March cried out: ‘I wish the Jews would stop being news!’

It was a shout of protest: but somehow he said it as a jingle, and as though they were doing it on purpose. Even that night there were lips being compelled not to smile. Mr March could feel the ripple round him. He scowled and went on: ‘You need not respect my feelings about such matters. I admit I never expected to see my religion getting this deplorable publicity. I never expected to spend my declining years watching people degraded because they belong to the same religion as myself. But I do not consider that these events should compel any of my relations to cripple their lives. I refuse to credit that they can be affected. And if they should be affected, which I repeat is not possible, they would be better off in the company of their children. If their children turn out to be a consolation, and not a source of grief.’

At that moment, Charles started to talk to his father. That last cry sounded in Charles’ ears. The lines of his face became deeper. Across the table he saw the wife whom he adored. He saw her looking strained and ill. With her face before him, he had to speak to his father.

As we listened, nearly everyone there thought there was going to be a reconciliation. It sounded as though he knew which choice must be made. Each word he spoke was affectionate, subtle, concerned. He seemed at first to be talking casually to his father about Haslingfield and Bryanston Square. Yet the words were charged with his feeling for his father, with his family pride, so long concealed, with his longing for privacy and ease with those he loved.

Gradually Charles got Mr March to talk, not in his old vein, but with some show of ease. He soon began to expand on the weather. ‘It’s been remarkable weather this summer,’ said Mr March. ‘Only exceeded in wretchedness in my experience by the summer of 1912, which I always blamed for the regrettable misadventure of the third housemaid. It is the first summer since 1929 when there has been no danger of drought at my house in the country. It is the first summer since 1929 that I have not been compelled to make my guests ration the amount of water in their baths.’ He turned to me. ‘1929 was, of course, singularly difficult. I remember that, on your first visit to my house in the country, I was compelled to allow you a maximum of four inches in your bath. The time I issued those instructions to you was immediately followed by the appearance of Ann Simon after luncheon.’

He did not look at Ann.

The name came as a shock. There was a silence.

Charles recovered himself, and said: ‘It wasn’t a direct consequence, Mr L.’

‘No! No! I’ve always presumed that she was invited through the ordinary channels.’

Mr March was quiet.

‘You’re not certain that anyone has ever been properly invited to any house of yours, are you?’ said Charles.

From his tone, so much more intimate than teasing, I knew that he would not stop trying to persuade Mr March of what he felt.

‘You’ve never been able to trust your children to behave with reasonable decorum, have you?’ Charles went on.

‘That is so,’ said Mr March. ‘As I remarked recently, I ought to have been born in a different epoch.’

‘I think perhaps I ought to have been too,’ said Charles.

‘You’re better prepared to endure unpleasantnesses than I am,’ said Mr March. ‘Whereas I only require to pass my declining years in peace.’

‘I’m not as well prepared as you are, Mr L,’ Charles said. ‘And I don’t like the prospect of the future much more than you do.’

‘I never liked the prospect of any unpleasantness,’ said Mr March. ‘But that’s my temperament, I’ve told you before. I’m a diffident and retiring person.’

‘Don’t you see that our temperaments are very much alike?’ said Charles. His tone suddenly turned urgent and anxious. ‘Even though we seem to do different things. I may do things you wouldn’t have done, but we’re much more alike than most fathers and sons. I wish you’d believe it. At bottom, we’re very similar people. Father, don’t you know that we are?’

A smile forced itself, as though with difficulty, through to Mr March’s face, a smile that became delighted, open, and naïf.

While some of us felt a wave of relief, thought it was all over, felt a sense of relief overwhelming, tired and at the same time sparkling gay, Mr March seemed half-incredulous, half-happy.

He said, in a rapid mutter, that he would like to have a ‘consultation’ with Charles and Ann ‘not later than the end of the present week’.

Charles said yes.

Mr March deliberately changed the conversation, and talked happily to the rest of us, about subjects in which he and we were equally uninterested.

As Charles rose to say goodbye, Ann gave a gasp. As soon as I looked at her, I knew it was a gasp of pain. Charles went to her, asking with extreme anxiety what was the matter.

‘I’m not particularly well,’ she said.

‘You’ve not been well all night,’ he said. He put a hand on her forehead and felt her pulse.

‘Why haven’t you told me?’ he said, in a tone so distressed that it sounded harsh and scolding. He turned to his father. ‘I must get her home at once. Lewis, will you ring my partner and tell him that I shall want him to attend to her?’

Mr March stood up and went to him.

‘Is she ill?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Charles.

‘Is it undesirable to move her?’

Charles hesitated, and before he replied Mr March said in a loud voice: ‘I insist that she stays in my house. I refuse to accept responsibility if you subject her to unnecessary movement.’

‘She would rather be at home,’ said Charles.

‘I cannot regard her inclinations as decisive. I believe that you would make her stay if it were not for previous circumstances. I cannot accept your recent assurances if you find it necessary to remove her from my house now.’

They looked into each other’s eyes. Their faces were transformed from what they had been half an hour before, when Charles made his ‘assurances’ to his father. They were heavy, frowning, distressed.

‘I think I had better stay,’ said Ann, who was lying back below them in her chair.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you tell them to be quick? She ought to be in bed at once,’ said Charles curtly to his father.

Mr March rang for the butler, and said to Charles: ‘If you have no strong objection, I should prefer to send for my practitioner. He is competent as those fellows go, and he can be available without so much delay.’

Before Charles replied, Ann said: ‘Yes, let him come.’

The servants worked at speed. Within five minutes Ann and Charles were out of the room; within ten the car of Mr March’s doctor drew up outside. The rest of us stayed there. We talked perfunctorily. Once or twice Mr March startled us by speaking with animation: then he relapsed into his thoughts.

It was a long time before Charles came back. His face was drained of colour, and he spoke straight to his father. His voice was quiet and hard: ‘It may be a pneumonia. She’s ill.’

A look of recognition passed between them. Mr March did not speak.

38: Desires by a Bedside

I called to ask after her on each of the next two afternoons. On the first day I found Mr March alone, distracted and restless, telling me it was beyond doubt pneumonia, inventing one service after another that he might do for Ann. His car shuttled between Bryanston Square and Pimlico, fetching her belongings; he kept questioning the doctors and nurses; he went out himself to buy her flowers.

On the second afternoon Mr March and Charles both came to see me in the drawing-room. Mr March was still fretting for things that he could do. He behaved as though any action was a relief to his mind: but, when he asked Charles three times in ten minutes what else was needed, he got cold replies. Those replies did not spring simply from suspense. They were cold because of the tension present in the room between them.

In a short time Mr March went out. At once Charles’ whole expression changed; his face became at once less hard and more ravaged. He spoke without any pretence.

‘It will be days before we know that she’s safe. Orange — Mr March’s doctor — says that he wouldn’t have expected it to take hold of her like this.’ He cried out: ‘Lewis, I wish I had her courage.’

‘I’ve often wished that,’ I said.

‘It’s the sort of courage I just can’t compete with,’ Charles said. ‘She won’t stop thinking about this affair of the Note. She told me that it was on that account she must know exactly how ill she is. She wouldn’t ask me, but she did ask Orange. She just said that her father and her husband were both doctors, and she wanted to be discussed as though she were a case in front of the class. Mind you,’ he said, with an automatic smile, ‘intelligent people often ask one to do that. It doesn’t prevent one from lying to them.’ He went on: ‘But so far as a human being can, she meant it.’

‘Did he tell her?’

‘He told her that she was dangerously ill.’

He had mentioned ‘this affair of the Note’ almost with indifference. I wondered, didn’t he think of connecting it with her illness? She could not have fallen ill at a more critical time; if she had been a stranger, wouldn’t he have said that perhaps it was not entirely a coincidence?

Yet he spoke of ‘this affair of the Note’ as though it did not matter: even when he went on to say:

‘He told her that she was dangerously ill. When she knew that, she asked to see you before tonight. She wants to tell you something in private — it must be the same business. She wants to see you very much, Lewis. Do you mind going in? Can you spare the time? Are you sure it won’t make you late?’

The strain sharpened his courtesy and for an instant he was genuinely worrying about my comfort. On the stairs, going towards Ann’s room, he said: ‘Do what she asks. Do what she asks — whatever it is.’

As he opened the bedroom door he forced his manner to change.

‘Here is Lewis,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t speak for very long. You can let him have his share of the conversation, can’t you?’

Mr March’s wife had once occupied this bedroom, the largest in the house. The bed itself was wide and high, and was overhung by a canopy; it drew my eyes across the great room, to the figure lying still under the clothes.

She was lying on her right side. Her face was flushed and her eyes bright, and her expression was constricted with strain. She gave a short dry cough, which made her give a painful frown. Her breathing was quick and heavy. There was sweat on her upper lip, and what looked to me like a faint rash.

She muttered a greeting to me, and said to Charles: ‘Darling. Will you leave him here a bit?’

‘If you want me to,’ said Charles, standing by her, looking down at her, unwilling to go.

No one spoke for a moment. There was no noise but the gasp of her breathing. Then she said:

‘Please.’

Charles glanced at me, and went out.

When the door closed, she said: ‘Lewis, this isn’t so good for Charles to go through. He’s been here all night. It wasn’t a good night for him. We talked about some things. When I was lucid more or less. It’s the worst thing — Lewis — feeling that you are soon not going to be lucid.’ She had to stop. After a pause she went on: ‘They think there’s a chance I may die, don’t they?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Be honest.’

‘I suppose there’s a chance.’

She stared at me.

‘Somehow I don’t think I shall,’ she said.

She broke out: ‘But there’s one thing I must get settled. I shall feel easier if I get it settled.’

She coughed and paused again.

‘There’s one thing I haven’t talked out with Charles. I can’t rely on thinking it out properly now, can I?’ she said. ‘I mean the showdown over the paper.’

She went on: ‘Some people wouldn’t be sorry if I were finished with.’

Her voice was faint and husky. Suddenly her will shone out, undefeated.

‘I’m not going to back out now,’ she whispered. ‘If I get over this, then I’ll have plenty of time to talk to Charles again. If I don’t, will you give him a message? He’ll understand that I wasn’t ready to back out — the last thing I did—’ She was not quite coherent, but I knew that by ‘backing out’ she meant ruining the Note, reneging on the cause. ‘But tell him, now he must settle it. He can do whatever he likes. The letters are in my steel filing cabinet under H. He’ll find the key in my bag. If Charles decides to stop the paper, he’s only got to send them to Ronald or the chap in the Home Office. The letters are mixed up with some others, they’ll need a bit of organizing. I couldn’t do that now.’

The effort tired her out. She fell asleep, although her body moved without resting. Sometimes she spoke. Once she said, quite clearly, as though continuing the conversation: ‘Charles would have to marry again. Someone who wouldn’t make trouble. And could give him children, of course.’ At other times she called on her father, cried out Charles’ name. Most of the time in her sleep she seemed — although when conscious she had spoken so coolly — tormented by anxiety or sheer fear. Her cries sounded as though she were in a nightmare.

Sitting there — through the window the trees of the square shone green and gold in the sunlight — I could imagine what Charles’ night by the bedside must have been like. As I watched her, fears seemed to be piling upon her like faces in a nightmare. She woke for a few minutes, lucid and controlled again: she said without fuss that she was afraid of dying. But, when she lost consciousness, quite different fears broke out of her. She cried about the hate that others felt for her. She was terrified of them, terrified that they were persecuting her, terrified that she was at their mercy. She tossed about the bed, calling out names, some of which I had never heard, but among them several times that of Mr March; she called out his name in fright, she was trying to get away from an enemy. Then she seemed to be making a speech.

I went down to the drawing-room, where the afternoon sun was streaming in. Mr March and Charles sat there, but neither spoke.

‘How did you leave her, Lewis?’ said Mr March at last.

‘She was asleep,’ I said.

‘How did you think she seemed?’ he went on.

I did not know how to reply.

‘I’ve not seen enough illness to tell,’ I said.

Mr March was fretted with anxiety. His eyes were sombre; he was more restless than Charles.

‘I should like to be reassured that everything within human power is being done. I should like to insist that my practitioner is instructed to obtain further advice apart from the fellow he brought in yesterday.’

Charles did not reply to his father. He said to me: ‘Did she tell you what she wanted to?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Charles.

‘I shall not be easy,’ said Mr March again, ‘until I am convinced that everything within human power is being done.’

Charles looked at him and said: ‘Leave it to me, that’s all I ask of you.’