Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

For a few seconds it was all quiet. Then Ann said to him: ‘Look, if you think Lewis is right and I ought to tell the Note about it—’

‘It means making a private plea, doesn’t it? And you wouldn’t want to unless it’s really dangerous?’

‘Of course I shouldn’t want to.’ She added, talking to him as though I was not there: ‘I’ll do it tomorrow if you think I ought to.’

Suddenly I felt that she wanted him to tell her to. He was hesitating. He could have settled it for her, but he seemed reluctant or disinclined.

He knew, of course, better than I did how much political action, the paper itself, meant to her. But it was not only consideration and empathy that held him back. Nearly all the Marches, seeing his hesitation, would have had no doubt about it: he was under her influence, she was the stronger, he did what she told him.

The truth was just the opposite. Often he behaved to her, as now, with what seemed to many people an exaggerated consideration, a kind of chivalry which made one uncomfortable. But the reason was not that he was her slave, but that she was his. She adored him: at the heart of their marriage she was completely in his power. It was out of a special gratitude, it was to make a kind of amend, that he was driven to consider her so, in things which mattered less.

To understand his hesitation just then, one needed to have been present that night when Mr March accused her of ‘wearing the trousers’ — and Charles’ smile, unpredictable as forked lightning, lit up the room.

‘If you think I ought to,’ she said.

‘You mustn’t decide anything now,’ he said, with deliberation, with careful sense. ‘But there might be a time when you’ll have to, mightn’t there?’

After that night I did not hear whether Ann had made her explanations to the Note . On my way down to Haslingfield, a fortnight later, I took with me a file of the paper: I wanted to know what legal risks they ran.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that I arrived at Haslingfield. I found Mr March occupied with Katherine’s children, telling me that he had had no fresh news from Philip and at the same time rolling a ball along the floor for his grandson to run after. It was a wet, warm summer day and the windows of the drawing-room stood open. The little boy was aged four, and his fair hair glistened as he scampered after the ball. His sister, aged two, was crawling round Mr March’s legs. Mr March rolled the ball again, and told them they were ‘making frightful asses of themselves’.

Gazing at them, Mr March said to Katherine and me: ‘I must say they look remarkably Anglo-Saxon.’

Each of the children had the March eyes, and it seemed that they would stay fair.

Mr March went on: ‘They look remarkably unlike the uglier members of our family. Hannah says that everyone in the family is more presentable when young, but I told her that she must have forgotten Caroline’s children in their infancy.’

Katherine chuckled. She and her father were not only becoming fonder of each other, but the bond of sympathy between them seemed to grow stronger each time I saw them. She was pregnant again, and he had insisted that she came to Haslingfield during July, ‘on the firm undertaking’, as he wrote to her, ‘that you attempt to run the household, though I have never concealed my lack of faith in your abilities in that direction, until a date when your attention is distracted by other developments’.

Actually, she ran the household so that it was more comfortable than I remembered: since her marriage, she had cultivated a talent for comfort. Not even Mr March kept a closer eye on one’s physical whims, frailties, likes and dislikes.

That evening, as we waited before dinner for Mr March, I was presented with a Moselle which she had noticed me enjoy on my first visit to Haslingfield, when Charles and Ann were within a few hours of meeting.

Katherine said: ‘You remember that night, don’t you, Lewis? I was tremendously excited because Francis was coming next day. And you made a remark which might have meant that you guessed I was in love. I lay awake a bit that night wondering whether you really intended it. Francis says that was probably the only sleep he’s ever cost me. But I remind him that it was only for an hour.’

She was content. Her third child was due in early August; with Mr-March-like precision, she announced the probable day with a margin of error plus or minus. Also like Mr March, she harried her doctors, wanted to know the reasons for their actions, and would not be put off by bedside patter. Francis had told me some stories about her that were very much in her father’s line, full of the same physical curiosity and the same assumption that a doctor is someone whose time you pay for, and whose advice you consider rather as you would an electrician’s when he brings a new type of bulb. ‘I don’t believe you treat doctors in her fashion,’ Francis had said, ‘unless you have been born scandalously rich.’

Katherine denied it. But as a rule she was content to follow his lead. Just as she had once accepted her brother’s opinions, now she accepted her husband’s. She had resisted everyone’s attempts to educate her: first Charles’, and then Francis’, with some irregular incursions of my own.

Yet I often felt that she had matured faster than any of us. In a way singularly like her father’s after he retired from business, she had become at twenty-seven completely, solidly, and happily herself.

Her anxieties now were all about her children. Her self-conscious moments were so mild that she laughed at them. After one of her dinner parties she would keep Francis awake wondering if a remark of hers had been misunderstood, and why a pair of guests left at a quarter past ten; she worked round and round her speculations with the family persistence; the habit remained but the edge had gone.

On this night at Haslingfield, though she kept saying every ten minutes: ‘Charles promised to ring up about coming down tomorrow. I’m getting into a state. It will be intolerable if he forgets’, it was nothing but the residue of the old habit.

At last the telephone bell rang in the hall, and the butler told her that Mr Charles was asking for her. Having seen her run to the telephone so many times, I found it strange to wait while she walked upright, slow, eight months gone.

Katherine returned and said that Charles was hoping to come down for dinner on the following night, but would have to get back to London to sleep. ‘Whether that’s because of his practice or Ann I couldn’t tell,’ she said. ‘I should think it’s because of Ann, shouldn’t you?’ Her face became thoughtful and hard. For a moment she looked set, determined, middle-aged. ‘That takes me back again to the first time you came here. You realize that I invited Ann specially for you, don’t you? I definitely hoped you’d make a match of it. I thought she might be attractive enough to distract you from Sheila. I never thought of her for Charles at all.’ She looked at me intently. ‘Well, Lewis, my dear, I believe my scheme might have been better for everyone. I know I oughtn’t to talk about Sheila, but you must realize that your friends hate to see her eating your life away. And on the other hand, if you had married Ann, you would have kept her in order. She wouldn’t have tried to make a different man of you as she’s tried with Charles. Yes, it would have been better if my scheme had come off.’

The warm, wet wind lashed round the house all Sunday, and I spent the whole day indoors. In the morning I talked for an hour with Mr March alone. He said that Philip was now convinced that the gossip had blown itself out, and accordingly did not consider it worth while to discuss ‘ancient history’ in the shape of the Howard & Hazlehurst dealings in 1929. Mr March was left apprehensive. I wished I could have told him that Ann and Charles had settled his worries. But I did say that there might be good news for him soon.