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  Copyright & Information

  The Conscience of the Rich

  First published in 1958

  © Philip Snow; House of Stratus 1958-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of C.P. Snow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120078 EAN 9780755120079

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  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age eleven at Alderman Newton’s School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he became an external student in science of London University, as the local college he attended in Leicester had no science department. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience by working as a laboratory assistant at Newton’s to gain the necessary practical experience needed.

  Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. There, he went on to become a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature, and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period, with his first novel Death Under Sail published in 1932, and in 1940 ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.

  Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, he became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. ‘The Light and the Dark’ was published in 1947, followed by ‘Time of Hope’ in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, ‘The Masters’, in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.

  He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology.When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords.

  After finishing the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow continued writing both fiction and non-fiction. His last work of fiction was ‘A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fiction included a short life of Trollope published in 1974 and another, published posthumously in 1981, ‘The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World’. He was also inundated with lecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, he became Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wrote influential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.

  In these later years, Snow suffered from poor health although he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active as a writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died later that day of a perforated ulcer.

  ‘Mr Snow has established himself, on his own chosen ground, in an eminent and conspicuous position among contemporary English novelists’ - New Statesman

  Part One

  Inside a family

  1: Confidences on a Summer Evening

  It was a summer afternoon, the last day of the Bar final examinations. The doors had just swung open; I walked to my place as fast as I could without breaking into a run. For an instant I was touched again by the odour of the old Hall, blended from wooden panels, floor polish, and the after-smell of food; it was as musty as a boarding house, and yet the smell, during those days, became as powerful in making one’s heart lift up and sink as that of the sea itself.

  As I stared at the question-paper, I went through an initial moment in which the words, even the rubric ‘Candidates are required to answer…’ appeared glaring but utterly unfamiliar. At the beginning of each examination I was possessed in this way: as though by a magnified version of one of those amnesias in which a single word – for example TAKE – looks as though we have never seen it before, and in which we have to reassure ourselves, staring at the word, that it occurs in the language and that we have used it, spelt exactly in that fashion, every day of our lives.

  Then, all of a sudden, the strangeness vanished. I was reading, deciding, watching myself begin to write. The afternoon became a fervent, flushed, pulsing, and exuberant time. This I could do; I was immersed in a craftsman’s pleasure. In the middle of the excitement I was at home.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, the sunlight fell in a swathe across the room, picking out the motes like the beam from a cinema projector. I was cramped, tired, and the sweat was running down my temples; my hand shook as I stopped writing.

  In that moment, I noticed Charles March sitting a little farther up the hall, across the gangway. His fair hair, just touching the beam of sunlight, set it into a blaze. His head was half turned, and I could see the clear profile of his clever, thin, fine-drawn face. As he wrote, hunched over his desk, his mouth was working.

  I turned back to my paper, for the last spurt.

  I had been a little disappointed at not meeting Charles during the course of the examination. We had only talked to one another a few times, when we happened to be eating dinners at the Inn on the same night; but I thought that at first sight we had found something like kinship in each other’s company.

  I knew little of the actual circumstances of his life, and the little I knew made
the feeling of kinship seem distinctly out-of-place. He came from Cambridge to eat his dinner at the Inn, I from a bed-sitting room in a drab street in a provincial town. His family was very rich, I had gathered: I was spending the last pounds of a tiny legacy on this gamble at the Bar.

  We had never met anywhere else but at the Inn dining table. When I last saw him, we had half arranged to go out together one night during the examination. All I had heard from him, however, was a ‘good luck’ on the first morning, as we stood watching for the doors to open.

  At last the invigilator called for our papers, and I stayed in the gangway, wringing the cramp out of my fingers and waiting for Charles to come along.

  ‘How did you get on?’ he said.

  ‘It might have been worse, I suppose.’ I asked about himself as we reached the door. He answered: ‘Well, I’m afraid the man next to me is the real victim.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘He was trying to get a look at my paper most of the afternoon,’ said Charles. ‘If the poor devil managed it, I should think he’d probably fail.’

  I laughed at him for touching wood. He began protesting, and then broke off: ‘Look here, would it be a bore for you if we had tea somewhere? I mean, could you possibly bear it?’

  I was already used to his anxious, repetitious, emphatic politeness; when I first heard it, it sounded sarcastic, not polite.

  We went to a tea-shop close by. We were both very hot, and I was giddy with fatigue and the release from strain. We drank tea, spread the examination paper on the table and compared what we had done. Charles returned to my remark about touching wood: ‘It’s rather monstrous accusing me of that. If I’d shown the slightest sign of ordinary human competence–’ Then he looked at me. ‘But I don’t know why we should talk about my performances. They’re fairly dingy and they’re not over-important. While yours must matter to you, mustn’t they? I mean, matter seriously?’

  ‘Yes, very much,’ I said.

  ‘Just how much? Can you tell me?’

  In the light of his interest, which had become both kind and astringent, I was able to tell the truth: that I had spent the hundred-or-two pounds I had been left in order to read for the Bar; that I had been compelled to borrow some more, and was already in debt. There was no one, literally no one, I had to make it clear, to whom I could turn for either money or influence. So it rested upon this examination. If I did exceptionally well, and won a scholarship that would help me over the first years at the Bar, I might pull through; if not, I did not know what was to become of me.

  ‘I see,’ said Charles. ‘Yes, it’s too much to invest in one chance. Of course it is.’ He paused. ‘You’ve done pretty well, of course, you know that, don’t you? I’m sure you have.’ He pointed to the examination paper, still lying on the tablecloth. ‘You’re pretty confident up to a point, aren’t you? Whether you’ve done well enough – I don’t see that anyone can say.’

  He gave me no more assurance than I could stand. It was exactly what I wanted to hear said. The tea-shop had grown darker as the sun dipped behind the buildings across the street. We both felt very much at ease. Charles suggested that we should have a meal and go to a theatre; he hesitated for a moment. Then he said: ‘I should like you to be my guest tonight.’ I demurred: because of the flicker, just for an instant, of some social shame. I remembered the things I usually forgot, that he was rich, elegantly dressed, with an accent, a manner in ordering tea, different from mine. Hurriedly Charles said: ‘All right. I’ll pay for the meal and you can buy the tickets. Do you agree? Will that be fair?’ For a few minutes we were uncomfortable. Then Charles went to telephone his father’s house, and came back with a friendly smile. Our ease returned. We walked through the streets towards the west, tired, relaxed, talkative. We talked about books. Charles had just finished the last volume of Proust. We talked about politics; we made harsh forecasts full of anger and hope. It was 1927, and we were both twenty-two.

  He took me to a restaurant in Soho. Carefully, he studied the menu card; he looked up from it with a frown; he asked if his choice would suit me and ordered a modest dinner for us both. I knew that he had not forgotten my reluctance to be treated. But now, as we sat by the window (below, the first lights were springing up in the warm evening), his meticulous care seemed familiar, a private joke.

  An hour later, we were walking down Shaftesbury Avenue to the theatre. When we arrived at the box office, Charles said: ‘Just a minute.’ He spoke to the girl inside: ‘We asked you to keep seats for Mr Lewis Eliot. Have you got them ready?’

  He turned to me, and said in an apologetic tone: ‘I thought of it when I was ringing up my father. I decided we might as well be safe. You don’t mind too much, do you?’

  He stood aside from the grille in order that I could pay for the tickets. The girl gave them to me in an envelope. They were for the pit.

  I could not help smiling as I joined him; his manoeuvres seemed now even more of a joke. They had made it impossible for me to be extravagant, that was all. As he caught my eye he also began to smile. As we stood in the foyer people passed us, one couple breaking into grins at the sight of ours.

  We took our places as the house was filling up. The orchestra was playing something sweet, melancholy, and facile. I did not make an attempt to listen, but suddenly the music took me in charge. As I sat down, I had begun to think again of the examination – but on the instant all anxieties were washed away. Not listening as a musician would, but simply basking in the sound, I let myself sink into the sensation that all I wanted had come to pass. The day’s apprehension disappeared within this trance; luxury and fame were drifting through my hands.

  Then, just before the curtain went up, I glanced at Charles. Soon the play started, and his face was alive with attention; but for a second I thought that he, whom I had so much envied a few hours before, looked careworn and sad.

  2: Invitation to Bryanston Square

  The results of the examination were published about a month later. I had done just well enough to be given a scholarship; Charles was lower in the list but still in the first class, which, in view of the amount of work he had done, was a more distinguished achievement than mine.

  In September we began our year as pupils and at once saw a good deal of each other. Charles met me the first day I came to London, and our friendship seemed to have been established a long time. He continued to ask about my affairs from where we left off on the night of the examination.

  ‘You’re settled for this year, anyway? You’ve got £150? You can just live on that, can’t you?’

  He got me to tell him stories of my family; he soon formed a picture of my mother and chuckled over her. ‘She must have been an admirable character,’ said Charles. But he volunteered nothing about his own family or childhood. When I asked one night, his manner became stiff. ‘There’s nothing that you’d find particularly interesting,’ he said.

  He kept entertaining me at restaurants and clubs. One evening he had to give me his telephone number; only then did he admit that he had been living since the summer in his father’s house in Bryanston Square. It was strange to feel so intimate with a friend of one’s own age, and yet be shut out.

  We entered different chambers: I went to Herbert Getliffe and he to someone called Hart, whom I knew by reputation as one of the ablest men at the Common Law Bar. The first weeks in chambers, for me at least, were lonely and pointless; there was nothing to do, and I was grateful when Getliffe appeared and with great gusto recommended some irrelevant book, saying, ‘You never know when it will come in handy.’ I was under-worked and over-anxious. I had taken two small rooms at the top of a lodging-house in Conway Street, near the Tottenham Court Road. Charles, guessing my state, drove round and fetched me out several nights a week. I wanted to discover why he, too, was harassed.

  We each knew that the other was troubled when alone: we each knew that his secretiveness hurt me: yet those first nights in London and in Charles’ company were in s
ome ways the most exhilarating I had spent. For a young provincial, the life in London took on, of course, a glamour of its own. Restaurants and theatres and clubs were invested with a warm, romantic haze. And we saw them in a style different from anything I had experienced. The prickliness of the examination evening did not last; it was not much like me, anyway. If we were to go out at all, Charles had to pay.

  I noticed that, after he had stopped protecting my feelings, he was not extravagant nor anything approaching it. At bottom, I thought, his tastes were simpler than mine. We ate and went out at night in a decent but not excessive comfort: Soho restaurants, the Carlton Grill, a couple of clubs, the circle and the back row of the stalls. It was decent and not luxurious; it was a scale of living that I had not yet seen.

  All that helped. I liked pleasure and good things: and it meant more to me than just the good things themselves; it meant one side, a subsidiary but not negligible side, of the life I wanted to win. Like most young men on the rise, I was a bit of a snob at heart.

  In fact, however, I should have gained almost as much exhilaration if I had been walking with Charles through the streets of my own town. There, in the past years as a student, I had made other intimate friends. But the closest of them was a very different person from myself; he saw the world, the people round him, his own passions, in a way which seemed strange to my temperament and which I had to learn step by step. While with Charles, right from our first meeting, I felt that he saw himself and other people much as I did; and he never exhausted his fund of interest.

  That was the real excitement, during the first months of our friendship. The picture of those early nights which remained in my memory bore no reference to the dinners and shows, much as I gloated in them; instead, I remembered walking together down Regent Street late one night.