Charles Snow - The Conscience of the Rich

After lunch I sat in the library reading the file of the Note which I had brought down. The issues ran from the middle of 1935 to the week before; I read with attention, forgetting the beat of rain against the windows and the howl of the wind. I found nothing in the way of a financial accusation, except one tentative hint. But there was a series of facts, bits of personal information, quoted sayings, about people in the circles where Sir Philip moved, the circles of junior ministers, permanent secretaries, chairmen of large firms. Some of the facts I recognized, and I had heard some of the sayings: I knew them to be accurate.

I had tea brought up to the library, and went on reading. In some numbers it was not hard to guess which pieces of information Ann had brought in. Occasionally I thought I could see the hands of other acquaintances. I was making notes, for I thought there was no harm in being prepared when Katherine came in with Charles. ‘He’s just driven down through the wretched rain,’ she said. ‘I told him you’d been appallingly unsociable all afternoon.’

Charles came over to my chair and saw what I was reading. ‘I didn’t know he had such a passion for political information, did you?’ he said to Katherine.

He seemed quite untroubled.

‘Have you noticed,’ he asked me, ‘how many of their predictions actually come off?’

‘Too many,’ I said.

He turned to Katherine. ‘Ann does a good deal for it, did you realize that?’ He spoke casually, but with affection and pride.

‘I take the rag,’ said Katherine, ‘but I hadn’t the slightest idea.’

‘I don’t suppose you read it,’ Charles teased her. ‘Do you make Francis read it aloud in bed? Don’t you agree that’s the only way you ever read anything at all?’

Mr March had come into the room behind them.

‘I assume that your lucubrations have been completely disturbed by my family,’ he said to me. ‘I suggest that it would be considerably less sepulchral in the drawing-room. I don’t remember such a July since Hannah came to stay in 1912. She said that she wouldn’t have noticed the weather so much in her own house, but that didn’t prevent her from outstaying her invitation.’

There were only a few minutes before dinner when I could talk to Charles alone. No, he said, Ann had not yet appealed to Seymour. No, so far as Ann knew, the Note had not got any usable facts about Getliffe or anyone else. Yes, she would call the Note off for good and all; she was seeing Seymour next week; there was nothing to worry about.

All evening the talk was gay and friendly. Charles showed how glad he was to meet Katherine; he was demonstratively glad, more so than she. His manner to his father was easy, as though they had come together again after all that had happened — come together, not as closely as in the past, but on a new friendly footing where neither of them was making much demand. It was Charles’ wish that they should stay like this.

Mr March responded at dinner, more brilliantly even than when I last saw him and Charles together. It was the suspicious and realistic, I thought, who were most easy to reassure. It was the same in love: the extravagantly jealous sometimes needed only a single word to be transported into absolute trust.

Keeping up his liveliness, Mr March told a story of someone called Julian Baring, ‘a man I like very much if I am not under the obligation of meeting him’. Then I discovered at last the secret of Mr March’s Sunday night attire. The first time I went to Haslingfield, I had noticed with astonishment that on the Sunday night he wore a dinner jacket over his morning trousers and waistcoat. I had stayed there on a good many Sundays since, and I found this to be his invariable custom. Somehow I had never been able to enquire why, but this evening I did, and learned, through Mr March’s protestations, shouts, stories, and retorts to his children, that it was his way of lessening the servants’ Sunday work. The servants, as I knew, were always Gentiles. Mr March thought it proper that they should go to church on Sunday evening: and he felt that they would get there quicker if they had to put out only his jacket instead of a whole suit.

We went on talking of the March servants. All of them, like Mr March’s, were Gentiles. They moved from house to house within the family (for instance, Mr March’s butler had started as a footman in Sir Philip’s house). They seemed to become more snobbish about the family reputation than the Marches themselves. When Katherine married Francis, some of them protested to her maid — what a comedown it was! To them it was shameful that she had not made a brilliant match. They thought back with regret to the days when the March households had been full of opulent, successful guests. Mr March’s servants in particular could not forgive Charles and Katherine for bringing to Bryanston Square and Haslingfield no one but young men like Francis and myself, without connections, without wardrobes, instead of the titles, the money, the clothes, which brought a thrill into their lives and which they felt in a position to expect.

Most of these accounts came through Katherine’s maid. Mr March guffawed as he heard them, but with a nostalgia of his own.

We listened, as we could not help doing that month, to the nine o’clock news. When the items about the Spanish war had finished, Charles switched off the wireless and both he and I were silent. Mr March looked at us, becoming irascible as he saw our concern. He said loudly:

‘I say, a plague on both your houses.’

‘You don’t really say that,’ said Charles. ‘It wouldn’t be quite so dangerous if you did.’

‘I repeat,’ retorted Mr March, ‘it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

‘It’s as clear an issue,’ said Charles, ‘as we shall have in our time.’

‘You’re only indulging in this propaganda,’ cried Mr March, ‘because of the influence of your connections.’

‘No,’ I put in. ‘I should say exactly the same. I’m afraid I should, say more, Mr L. I believe this is only the beginning. The next ten or twenty years aren’t going to be pretty.’

‘You’re all succumbing to a bad attack of nerves,’ said Mr March.

Charles said with a grin: ‘I don’t think so. But remember I’ve got some reason to be nervous. If it does come to the barricades, Ann will insist, of course, on fighting herself. But she’ll also insist on making me fight too.’

Katherine and I laughed, but Mr March merely smiled with his lips. He was preoccupied; his voice, instead of being animated, went flat, as though the mind behind it was being dragged away, dragged from question to question. Charles rose to go. He said goodbye affectionately to his father, and very warmly to Katherine, whom he did not expect to see until her child was born; I went down with him to his car. It was still raining, and a wild night. Charles was in a hurry to get back home by midnight, as he had promised Ann. I mentioned that I wanted to have another word with her, and he said, casually and in entire friendliness, how much she would like that. Then he drove off. I stood for some moments watching the tail-lamp of his car dwindling down the drive.

The next day passed quietly until the late evening. The afternoon was a fine interval among the storms, and I walked in the grounds. When I returned for tea, I found a professional letter had just arrived, which occupied me for a couple of hours. I noticed, without giving it a second thought, that the same post had brought Katherine one or two letters, as well as her daily one from Francis.

After dinner, when we moved into the drawing-room, Katherine rested on a sofa. Mr March was talking to her about her children. Both of them gained satisfaction from providing against unlikely contingencies in the years ahead. The curtains were not drawn yet, the sky was still bright at ten o’clock. It was pleasant to bask there, listening to Mr March, while the short summer night began to fall.