Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

‘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.’