Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

‘Is she all right?’

‘I think she’s very happy.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon she went to bed herself.

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

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

‘When did you?’

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

‘He’s very fond of her,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

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

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

‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’

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