The Conscience of the Rich Page 5

  ‘What shall you do?’ I said, after a silence. ‘Do you know what your career’s to be?’

  ‘Most people will assume that I intend to drift round and become completely idle.’

  Then I asked if anyone else knew of his abandoning the Bar. He shook his head.

  ‘Mr L will be disappointed, of course,’ he said.

  ‘He was talking to me yesterday,’ I said. ‘He was delighted about the case. He’s set his heart on your being a success in the world.’

  For a moment, Charles was angry.

  ‘You’re exaggerating that,’ he said. ‘You forget that he’d get equally excited if any of his relations made a public appearance of any kind.’ Then he added, in a different tone:

  ‘I hope you’re not right.’

  I was startled by the concern which had suddenly entered his voice: he seemed affected more strongly than either of us could explain that night.

  6: Full Dinner Party

  Within a few days of Charles’ visit, he told me that he had broken the news to Mr March. He also told me how Mr March had responded: he wanted to convince me that his father had accepted the position without distress. In fact, Mr March’s behaviour seemed to have been odd in the extreme.

  His first reply was: ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’ This was said in a flat, dejected tone, so Charles admitted: but at once Mr March began to grumble, almost as though he were parodying himself: ‘You ought to have chosen a more suitable time to tell me. You might have known that hearing this would put me out of step for the day.’ Then he added again: ‘In any case, I don’t believe a word of it.’

  For several days he refused to discuss the matter. He seemed to be pretending that he had forgotten it. At the same time, he kept asking with concern about his son’s health and spirits; one day at lunch, without any preamble, he offered Charles a handsome increase of his allowance to pay for a holiday.

  Mr March still went about the house as though he had not so much as heard Charles’ intention. It was not until the next full family dinner party that he had to face it.

  Each Friday night, when they were in London, Mr March and his brothers took it in turn to give a dinner party to the entire family: the entire family in its widest sense, their wives, their sisters and their sisters’ husbands, the children of them all, remoter relations. When I first knew the Marches, it was rare for a ‘Friday night’ to be attended by less than thirty, and fifty had been reached at least once since 1918.

  The tradition of these parties went back continuously to the eighteenth century; for the past hundred years they had been held according to the same pattern, every week from September to the end of the London season.

  As luck would have it, I was invited for that night. As a rule, friends of the family were asked only if they were staying in the house; it was by a slight extension of the principle that Mr March invited me.

  Getliffe’s brother Francis, whose friendship with Charles began in their undergraduate days, had been living at Bryanston Square for the week. When I arrived there for tea on the Thursday, the drawing-room was empty. It was Francis who was the first to join me. He came in with long, plunging, masterful strides, strides too long for a shortish man. His face was clearly drawn, fastidious, quixotic, with no kind of family resemblance to Herbert’s, who was his father’s son by a first marriage. He had not a trace of Herbert’s clowning tricky matiness. Indeed, that afternoon he was nervous in the Marches’ house, though he often stayed there.

  He disliked being diffident; he had trained himself into a commanding impatient manner; and yet most people at that time felt him to be delicate underneath. He was two years older than Charles; he was a scientist, and the year before had been elected a fellow of their college.

  ‘Will you dine with me tomorrow, Lewis?’ he asked. ‘They’ve got their usual party on here, and it’d be less trouble if I got out of the way.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Good work,’ said Francis. Then he asked, a little awkwardly, how I was getting on with his brother.

  ‘He’s very stimulating,’ I said.

  ‘I can believe that,’ said Francis. ‘But has he put you in the way of any briefs?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Francis cursed, and flushed under his dark sunburnt skin. He was both a scrupulous and a kind-hearted man.

  Just then Charles and Katherine came in. As we began tea, Francis said, with an exaggerated casualness: ‘By the way, I’ve arranged to dine out with Lewis tomorrow night. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? It’ll give you more room for the party.’

  Katherine’s face was open in disappointment.

  ‘I hoped you would come,’ she said.

  ‘I should be in the way,’ said Francis. ‘It will definitely be much better if I disappear.’

  Katherine recovered herself, and said:

  ‘You are more or less expected to come, you know. Mr L will say “If I am obliged to have the fellow residing in my house, I can’t send him away while we make beasts of ourselves.” He’ll certainly expect you to come.’

  ‘I don’t think I should do you credit,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll find points of interest, I promise you,’ she said.

  ‘I shouldn’t know many of them, you see–’

  ‘Look here,’ said Katherine, ‘do you want another Gentile to keep you company? I’m certain Lewis will oblige, won’t you?’

  She turned to me: as I heard that gibe of hers, I felt how fond she was of him.

  Since Charles had spoken to me about Jewishness, so had she. It was no longer a forbidden subject. ‘It was a bit hard,’ Katherine had said, ‘to be stopped riding one’s scooter in the Park on Saturday because it was the Sabbath, and then on Sunday too. It seemed to me monstrously unjust.’ She had gone on: ‘But the point was, you were being treated differently from everyone else. You wouldn’t have minded anything but that. As it was, you kept thinking about every single case.’ Less proud than Charles, she had talked about her moments of shame: but she was still vulnerable. It was not till she teased Francis about being a Gentile that I heard her speak equably, as though it did not matter any more.

  ‘It’s a bit hard on him,’ said Francis. He broke into a smile that, all of a sudden, narrowed his eyes, creased his cheeks, and made his whole expression warm: ‘I’d better tell you, I’m feeling very shy.’

  Charles broke in: ‘It’ll be slightly bizarre, but you must come. Even if it’s only to oblige Lewis. I’m sure he can’t resist the temptation. Incidentally, even if it weren’t so tempting, he wouldn’t be able to refuse it.’ Charles went on: ‘Lewis is temperamentally incapable of refusing any invitation, whether he wants to go or not. Isn’t that true?’

  Katherine asked Mr March as soon as he entered the house. He came into the room and invited us both. I knew he felt it irregular; he did not want either of us at a family party; but his natural warmth prevailed. ‘Eight o’clock sharp,’ he said. ‘And you must both dress suitably for once. For this occasion, I can’t possibly let you off.’

  I had never seen the house anything but empty before that Friday night. Cars were drawn up bonnet to stern in the square; from the hall one heard the clash of March voices; the drawing-room was full. There was already an orchestra-like effect of voices and laughs: this was the week’s exchange of family news. Every day, the Marches told each other the latest pieces of family gossip; Mr March would meet his brother Philip at the club, Philip would tell his wife, she would ring up her children; but it was on Friday night that the stories were crystallized, argued over, and finally passed into the common stock.

  Several of the characters in Mr March’s sagas were that night present in the flesh. Sir Philip, a spare man, the furrows of whose face seemed engraved not by anxiety but by a stiff, caustic humour – he took for granted his position as head of the family and here, in his brother’s house, he walked round the entire company, giving everyone a handshake and a switched-on truculent smile. Mr March’s favourite
sister Caroline, and her husband Lionel Hart, a brother of Charles’ former master. Their son Robert, who, despite Mr March’s pessimistic forecasts, had been for years successfully practising in company law. Florence Simon, the cousin who ‘thought she wouldn’t like it till she tried’. A large family of Herbert Marches, the children of the youngest brother. Mr March’s eldest daughter Evelyn, plump and pleasant-looking in a different fashion from Katherine, much darker and brown-eyed. She had married the editor of a Jewish paper, who was not present. Charles and Katherine said she was happy, but Mr March sometimes referred to her marriage with gloom.

  There were many unusual faces. Three or four looked, in the stereotyped sense, Jewish. Some of the older women were enormous. Both in face and figure, the party seemed the most unstandardized one could imagine. Beauty, grotesque oddity, gigantic fatness – the family went to all extremes. There was scarcely anyone there whom, for one reason or another, one would not look at twice.

  Unfortunately for me, Mr March’s eldest sister, Hannah, was not there. I wanted to see her, as she entered his narrative as a symbol of disapproval and the self-appointed leader of all oppositions. There was a legend of Mr March, on his way to his honeymoon at Mentone, putting his head out of the window at Saint Raphael and sniffing the air: then he turned to his bride and said: ‘The air is quite different here. Hannah would say it isn’t, but it is.’

  The dining-room was no more clearly lit than usual when we went in; the table had been lengthened to contain the party. Mr March placed Philip on his left hand, and Philip’s wife on his right: then the brothers and sisters in order of seniority: Charles at the far end of the table, and the younger people near him. I sat a place or two from Charles between Florence Simon and one of the Herbert March girls.

  Voices rose and blared as, looking down the table, I saw faces coming out of the shadows: I felt a glow because these Friday nights had gone on for so long. It was the warm romantic glow, the feeling of past time: the glow which made one of those dead and gone Friday nights become more enchanted in our minds than it ever was to sit through. I felt exactly as I sometimes did at dinner at the Inn, or when I was Francis’ guest at his High Table. The chain of lives – odd glimmers ran through my head, the fragments of information which had come down about the first English Marches sitting round their dinner-table in the City, just over their bank. The two original March families dined together on the Friday in the week they arrived in London from Deventer.

  How they had first got established in Holland, where they had come from before that, there was no record nor any tradition – not even of how they derived their name. In Spain March could have been a Jewish name, but there was no evidence that these Marches ever lived there. The first mention of them in the archives was mid-seventeenth-century: they were already in Holland, already one of the leading families of the Ashkenazim (the Northern group of Jews, as opposed to the Sephardim who lived in Spain and round the Mediterranean coasts).

  They were well-off when they left Deventer. During the last half of the eighteenth century, Friday night by Friday night, these parties went on, families walking to each other’s houses across the narrow City streets; their friends and relatives, the family of Levi Barend Cohen, the Rothschilds, the Montefiores, lived close by.

  The nineteenth century came in; all those families, like those of the Gentile bankers, moved westward; and the Marches’ dinners took place now round Holborn. It was already the fourth generation since Deventer; the children were no longer given Jewish first names. A honeymoon couple travelled in post-chaises along the French roads as soon as the war was over, and Charlotte March wrote in 1816: ‘it must be admitted that in the arts of the toilette and the cuisine France excels our country: but we can hearten ourselves as English people that in everything essential we are infinitely superior to a country which shows so many profligacies that it is charitable to attribute them to their infamous revolution.’ This though they stayed with their Rothschild uncle in Paris; that pair thought of themselves as English, differing as little from their acquaintances as the Roman Catholic families who, when Charlotte wrote, were still hoping to be emancipated.

  Victoria’s reign began. Round the dinner-table, the Marches were sometimes indignant at Jewish disabilities; David Salomons was not allowed to take his seat in Parliament. There was also talk, even in the forties, of liberalizing themselves; one March became a Christian. Apart from him, no March had married ‘out of the faith’: nor indeed out of their own circle of Anglo-Jewish families. That was still true down to the people round this table; except for one defection, by a woman cousin of Mr March’s, thirty years before.

  The March bank flourished; many of the families moved to the neighbourhood of Bryanston Square; by the seventies, one of Mr March’s uncles was holding Friday dinners at No. 17. The universities and Parliament became open, and Mr March’s father went into the House. England was the least anti-Semitic of countries; when the news of the pogroms arrived from Russia in 1880, the Lord Mayor opened a fund for Jewish relief. Half the University of Oxford signed a protest. The outrages seemed an anachronistic horror to decent prosperous Englishmen. The Marches sent thousands of pounds to the Lord Mayor’s fund. Yet that news was only a quiver, a remote quiver, in the distant world.

  By then the Marches had reached their full prosperity; on Friday nights cabs made their way under the gaslight to the great town houses. The Marches were secure, they were part of the country, they lived almost exactly the lives of other wealthy men.

  The century passed out: its last twenty years, and the next fourteen, were the best time for wealthy men to be alive. The Marches developed as prodigally as the other rich.

  Those were the heroic days of Friday nights. A whole set of stories collected round them, most of which originated when Mr March was a young man. Of Uncle Henry March, who owned race-horses and was a friend of the Prince of Wales; how he regretted all his life his slowness in repartee, and after each Friday night used to wake his wife in bed so that she should jot down answers which had just occurred to him. Of his brother Justin, who, to celebrate a Harrow victory, rode to his house on one of the horses that drew the heavy roller at Lord’s; and who, when only nine people attended one of his Friday nights, took hold of the tablecloth and pulled the whole dinner service to the ground. Of their cousin, Alfred March Hart, the balletomane who helped sponsor Diaghilev’s first season in London: who as an old man, hearing someone at a Friday night during the war hope for a Lansdowne peace, rose to his feet and began: ‘I am a very old man: and I hope the war will continue for many years after my death.’

  They were the sort of stories that one finds in any family that has been prosperous for two hundred years. For me they evoked the imaginary land which exists just before one’s childhood. Often as I heard them I felt something like homesick – homesick for a time before I was born, for a society which would have thought my father’s home about as primitive as a Trobriand Islander’s.

  The dinner began. At the head of the table, Philip and Mr March were talking about expectations for the Budget. Mr March suggested that supertax would be applied at a lower limit.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Philip. ‘That’s on a par with your idea for the new trust, Leonard.’

  Mr March chuckled.

  ‘I should like to remind you that your last idea didn’t bring in sufficient for your requirements. Also that you made an exhibition of yourself over that same trust. That was the time your husband wrote a letter so precipitately–’ He turned to his sister-in-law and began to tell the story which I heard on my first visit to Bryanston Square.

  ‘It’s fantastic to imagine Winston doing anything of the kind,’ Philip interrupted him. ‘After what he said to the unfortunate George. I wouldn’t believe it if George weren’t much too incompetent to invent the story.’

  The table quietened down. Philip gave the actual words. It was the first time I had heard behind-the-scenes gossip at that level: Philip endowed it with a spe
cial authority.

  The elder Marches listened with satisfaction as Philip settled the question of supertax. Most of them were not only academically interested; there was a great deal of wealth in the room. Exactly how much, I should have liked very much to know, but about their fortunes they were more reticent than about anything else. None of the younger generation, at our end of the table, could do more than guess. Apparently no individual March had ever been enormously rich. There had probably never been a million pounds at any one man’s disposal. So far as one could judge from wills, settlements, and their style of life, most of the fortunes at this dinner-table would be between £100,000 and £500,000.

  Philip was talking about the next election: ‘We’ve left it too late. We’re a set of bunglers. Our fellows had better stick it out until they’re bound to go.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ said Caroline.

  ‘We shall get the sack,’ said Philip.

  ‘Does that mean a Socialist Government?’ asked Florence Simon of Charles.

  ‘What else do you think it can mean?’ Mr March exclaimed down the table. ‘Now that your Aunt Winifred’s wretched party has come to the end that they’ve always richly deserved.’

  He was chuckling at Winifred, Herbert March’s wife, who was the only Liberal of the older generation. The Marches had been Conservatives for a hundred years; when they stood for Parliament, it was as supporters of Salisbury, Balfour, Bonar Law; their political attitudes were those of other rich men.

  At our end of the table, opinion moved a good way to the left. Herbert March’s daughter Margaret, who had not long since graduated at Oxford, was working as secretary to a Labour member. She was the most practical of them, the only professional: Charles took her side in argument, was more radical than she was, and Katherine followed suit. Most of the others had undertaken to vote against Sir Philip’s party. Of course, many other Marches had passed through a liberal phase in their youth – but to them that night, to me watching them, this seemed something harder, more likely to last.