Charles Snow: The Conscience of the Rich

‘I wonder if you would care to dine at my father’s house next week?’

I looked at him. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said: ‘It might interest you to see the inside of a Jewish family.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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