Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

I did not answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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