Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

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.’

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.