The Conscience of the Rich Page 8

  Mr March and Katherine were waiting in the courtyard. ‘Glad to see you arrive safely in my son’s car,’ said Mr March. ‘I wanted to send the chauffeur, but was overruled. I should have refused to answer for the consequences.’

  He took me into the drawing-room, bigger and lighter than at Bryanston Square. A great bay of windows gave on to the terrace; below lay the tennis court, the shadow of a tree just beginning to touch one of the service lines. The view stretched, lush and wooded, to the blue Surrey hills; the English view, every square yard man-made, and yet with neither a house nor a path in sight.

  Katherine poured out the tea. Mr March glanced at me.

  ‘You’re looking seedy,’ he said. ‘No! I’m prepared to believe that you can be allowed out of quarantine – if you admit that you’ve been living in a cellar.’

  ‘I’ve been working hard, Mr L,’ I said.

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it. It makes a great contrast to my deplorable family. I don’t propose to make any observations upon my son. As for my daughter, I suppose she can hardly be expected to perform any serious function – but she can’t even write foolproof letters to my guests. I detected her making a frightful ass of herself again on Tuesday; she admitted that she hadn’t sent Charles’ friend Francis Getliffe a list of the trains to Farnham.’

  Mr March seemed in good spirits. Katherine said: ‘For the fifth time, Mr L, I didn’t send Francis the trains because he knows them as well as you do.’ She smiled. ‘And I object to being referred to as though I was feeble-minded. Why can’t I be expected to perform any serious function?’

  ‘Women can’t,’ said Mr March. ‘Apart from any particular reflection on you as shown by these various incompetences.’

  The evening flowed on. Dinner in the late summer half-twilight was just as at Bryanston Square, with Mr March dressed and no one else: the routine was not altered, we went in on the stroke of eight, Mr March declaimed the menu. He talked on, as though he had been compulsorily silent for some time. Sir Philip had just been made a Parliamentary Secretary. Mr March’s astonishment and pride were each enormous. ‘I never thought any son of my father would reach the heights of a Minister. Possibly they considered,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that, as the Government is obviously about to go out in ignominy, it didn’t matter much whom they put in. Still, my father would have been extremely gratified.’ His reflections on Philip set him going on the main narrative-stream of his own journey round the world in the eighties, with subsidiary streams of, first, the attempt of Philip’s wife, ‘the biggest snob in the family’, to invite the Queen to tea: second, the adventures of Hannah and the Belgian refugees, ‘the only useful thing she ever tried to do, and of course she said it was a success: but no one else believed her’: third, his morning walk with Katherine yesterday, and her ignorance of the difficulties of moving back to Bryanston Square (in time for the Jewish New Year in September).

  Only the cricket scores were allowed to interrupt him when we moved back to the drawing-room. It was still very warm, and the butler brought in iced drinks after the coffee. We lay back, sipping them: but the heat did not quieten Mr March.

  Then, at 10.40 exactly, he broke off and performed his evening ritual. The whole household was in for the night, and so he went round the house with the butler to examine all the doors, after giving Charles instructions about the drawing-room windows. At last we heard him go upstairs to bed.

  Charles asked Katherine when the other two would arrive: he said (I did not catch the meaning for a moment): ‘I still think you could have found a more ingenious excuse.’ ‘That’s monstrous,’ said Katherine. She smiled. Her hair was tousled over her forehead; she usually managed to become untidy, I thought, by this time of night. She appealed to me: ‘I told you Mr L is prepared to disapprove of Ann in advance, for reasons best known to himself. So I decided we wanted someone else to soothe him down – and Francis is the obvious choice, you can’t deny it. It’s a perfectly good excuse.’ ‘You only decided it was good,’ Charles said, ‘after concealing it from me for two days.’

  ‘Privilege of hostess.’ Katherine smiled again. ‘Ah well – Lewis, don’t you agree that Mr L is getting more vigorous the older he becomes? I shall have to marry before he’s exhausted me completely.’

  She was laughing: but, as we listened to those words ‘I shall have to marry…’ and heard their caressing pleasure, we knew that she was in love.

  Soon she went to bed herself.

  ‘She liked being told that it was a bad excuse,’ I said.

  Charles said: ‘She’s only realized quite recently, I think.’

  ‘When did you?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you say,’ said Charles, ‘that she’s been getting fond of him for months?’

  ‘He’s very fond of her,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I nodded. Charles broke out: ‘I just can’t tell whether he’s in love, perhaps it’s harder for me to tell than anyone.’

  For a time we were silent. Then I asked, because the thought was in both our minds: ‘How much has Mr L noticed?’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea.’

  We were each thinking of her chances of being happy. Neither of us knew whether Francis wanted to marry her. If he did, I could not foresee what it would mean, her marrying a Gentile.

  Nevertheless, as Charles spoke of her, there was a trace of envy in his voice. Partly because he might be losing her; but mainly, I thought that night, because she had been taken up by an overmastering emotion, because she had lost herself and been swept away.

  We talked until late: of Katherine, Francis, Mr March, my work, and again of the books he had been reading. He had no news of his own.

  10: A Walk with Mr March

  At last we tiptoed up the broad slippery staircase, and went to our rooms. But in my case not to sleep, immediately at least; for the bedrooms at Haslingfield carried comfort to such a point that it was difficult to sleep at all.

  There was a rack of books, picked by Charles, several of which were just out – a Huxley, the latest of the Scott-Moncrieff translations, the books we had talked about that afternoon. There was a plate of sandwiches, a plate of fruit, a plate of biscuits. A Thermos flask of tea and one of iced lemonade. A small bottle of brandy. After one had had a snack, read a book or two, and finished off the drinks, one could snatch a few hours’ sleep – until, quite early in the morning, a footman began padding about the room, taking out clothes and drawing curtains. Which for me, who liked sleeping in the dark, finished the night for good.

  There was nothing for it but to get up. Although I arrived in the breakfast-room early, one place at the table had already been occupied; Mr March had been and gone. As I chose my breakfast from the dishes on the sideboard, I was puzzled for a moment. There were several plates of fried tongue, none of bacon. For a visitor used to rich houses, that was the only unfamiliar thing at Bryanston Square and Haslingfield.

  Katherine and Charles both came down late to breakfast. Twice, while I was sitting alone, Mr March entered rapidly, said ‘Good morning’ without stopping, and changed the newspaper he was holding out in front of him; first The Times for the Daily Telegraph, and then the Daily Telegraph for the Manchester Guardian.

  It was another hot day. Katherine was complaining at the prospect of her five-mile walk with Mr March before lunch; why does he insist on a companion, she said, pretending that she was only complaining as a joke. I thought that, as she waited for Francis to arrive, she did not relish being alone with Mr March. So I volunteered; and at exactly half past eleven we set off down the drive at Mr March’s walking pace, which was not less than four miles an hour. He wore his deerstalker, and before we had walked four hundred yards took it off, saying: ‘I must mop my bald pate.’ Several times he groaned, without slowing down: ‘I’m cracking up! I’m cracking up!’

  Nothing interrupted his walking, he neither slackened nor quickened his pace. The only interruptions to his talking were those he made himself. His fe
ats of total recall were as disconcerting as ever. For the first time I heard, out of the blue, the end of that gnomic story about his nephew Robert on the steps of the St James’s, which had tantalized me on my first visit to Bryanston Square. It appeared that Robert, tired of waiting for briefs, had taken to going to theatres, not just to pass the time or because of a disinterested passion for drama, but because he had conceived the idea of filling up his leisure by writing a play: all he was doing was study the technique. In Mr March’s view, this procedure was ill-judged, since he regarded it as axiomatic that Robert did not possess a shred of talent.

  We turned at the lodge gates and made off by a path among the trees. Mr March chuckled and pointed back to the lodge.

  ‘My son Charles,’ he said, ‘got himself into an unfortunate predicament a fortnight ago last Saturday. I had Oliver Mendl staying with me for the weekend. Of course I knew that he obeyed the Lawgiver more strictly than I do myself. His father was just the same. When he visited us, I used to have to open his letters on Saturday morning. Though I noticed that he always read them quick enough if he thought they contained anything to his advantage. Oliver invited Charles to come for a stroll, and in the circumstances Charles couldn’t very well refuse. It looked very threatening that morning. I said so as soon as I woke up: I was ten minutes later than usual, because my daughter Katherine had kept me awake by inconsiderately having a bath before she went to bed the previous night. She accuses me of shouting through the wall “You’ve done me in. I shall never get to sleep again, never again”. I strongly advised them to take overcoats or at least umbrellas. However, they preferred their own opinion and they’d just reached the lodge when it started to rain with violence. The only drop of rain we’ve had since July 19: remember you’re only allowed four inches in your bath. Charles showed more gumption than you might expect: he suggested ringing up from the lodge and asking Taylor to bring a car. It might have been a ridiculous suggestion, of course: you can’t expect to get a car unless you make proper arrangements in advance. As it happened, Taylor was not occupied between 10.30 and 12 that morning. So Charles could have obtained his car, but unfortunately he didn’t. Because Oliver begged him to order the car for himself, but depressed Charles by adding: “Of course I can’t use it today, I shall have to walk.” The Lawgiver forbade people of my religion to make journeys on the Sabbath: why, I’ve never been able to understand. Well, though I oughtn’t to pay him compliments, my son Charles is a polite young man with people he doesn’t know well. Hannah says he isn’t, but she’s only seen him when she’s present herself. On this occasion he felt compelled to walk back with Oliver. We heard an infernal noise when they got back, and I went out and found him standing on a towel in the hall. He expressed himself angrily whenever I pointed out how he could have avoided disaster.’

  Mr March was beaming with laughter. Then he added, quietly, and to my complete surprise: ‘Of course, he’s not bad-tempered as a rule. He wouldn’t have minded so much if it hadn’t been caused by the religion.’

  He went on: ‘Herbert was the same forty years ago. At the time when he was getting up to his monkey tricks about studying music. He didn’t much like to be reminded that he belonged to our religion.’

  Mr March added: ‘Of course, Herbert found that troubles of that nature passed away as he got older. I am inclined to think that the thickening of one’s skin is the only conceivable advantage of becoming old. If my son’s trouble was entirely due to his thin skin, I should cease to have periods of worry about him. But it isn’t so.’

  Mr March talked no more on our walk home. We arrived at the house a few minutes before his standard time of 12.45, and found Katherine eating an early lunch before going out to meet Ann Simon.

  11: Mr March Ends a Reflection

  Charles and I were alone at lunch with Mr March, who was still half-saddened, half-anxious, as he had been on the way home. I was certain by now that he was innocent about Katherine. As he talked to Charles, he had no thought of trouble from her. His concern was all for his son; he did not imagine any other danger to his peace of mind.

  He told some stories, but they were shot through with his affection for Charles. Because he was in that mood, he told us more than I had heard of his early life. At once one knew, more sharply than on the day he watched Charles’ case, how much of himself he was re-creating in his son.

  He described his own career. He talked, not as vivaciously as usual, but with his natural lack of pretence. ‘I never made much progress,’ he said.

  His father and Philip’s, the first Sir Philip, had been the most effective of all the Marches; he had controlled the March firm of foreign bankers and brokers when it was at its peak. ‘And in my father’s days,’ said Mr March, ‘they counted as more than a business house. Of course it would be different now. Everything’s on too big a scale for a private firm. Look at the Rothschilds. They used to be the most influential family in Europe. And they’ve kept going after we finished, they’ve not done badly, and what are they now? Just merchant bankers in a fairly lucrative way of business.’

  When his father died, Mr March, who would have preferred to go to the university, was brought in to fill a vacancy in the firm. ‘It was a good opening,’ he said to us, nearly fifty years after. ‘I wasn’t attracted specially to business, but I hadn’t any particular inclinations. I hoped you would have,’ he said to Charles.

  It was not during this conversation, but previously, that I had the curiosity to ask him about the routine of foreign banking, when he first joined the firm. There had still been an air about it, so it seemed. Each morning, the letters came in from the Marches’ correspondents: there had been two in Paris, and one in each of the other European capitals, including ‘the very capable fellow at St Petersburg. We never believed he was a Russian’. Since the bank started, they had depended on their correspondents, a group of men very similar in gifts and outlook to the foreign-based journalists of the twentieth century. In 1880 the Marches were still better informed, over a whole area of facts where politics and economics fused, than any newspaper. The March correspondents acquired a curious mixture of cynicism and world-view. Just because their finding the truth could be measured in terms of money, they learned what the truth was. All through 1870 one of the Paris correspondents was predicting war, and war in which the French army would be outclassed: Mr March’s father cleared some hundred thousand pounds. Right through the nineteenth century, up to the end of the bank in 1896, the foreign letters added sarcastic footnotes to history: they were unmoral, factual, hard-baked, much more hard-baked because they did not set out to be.

  The secret correspondent declined in value as communications got faster. The Marches’ telephone number was London 2; but they did not time their moves as certainly as when Mr March’s father opened his despatches in the morning. Mr March gallantly telephoned in French to Paris and Brussels every day as the bourses opened; but as the nineties passed by, neither his uncles nor Philip, nor he above all, felt they were in touch, even as much in touch as ten years before.

  Of course the scale of things was altering under their hands. Their loans of a million pounds or so to the Argentine or Brazil no longer went very far; they were coming near to a world of preposterous size – a world dangerous, mad, exciting beyond measure, and, as Mr March decided, no place for a financier of distinctly anxious temperament. It was about this time that the legend sprang up of his only being able to control his worry by balancing the firm’s accounts each night.

  They might have stayed in longer, but for a characteristic weakness against which Mr March struggled in vain. They would never take anyone outside the family into the firm. As Mr March argued and quarrelled with his uncles, he kept protesting that one man of a different sort from the Marches might vitalize them. But they were loyal to the family: the Marches had started the bank a hundred years before, they had controlled it ever since, they could not give power to a stranger. In fact, as they were good pickers of men, Mr March’s policy w
ould probably have made them richer; but, whatever happened, neither they nor any other ‘merchant banker in a fairly lucrative way of business’ would have stayed in usefully for long: the twentieth century needed, not single millions, but tens and hundreds of millions, and could only be financed by the joint stock banks.

  So they ceased business in 1896. They had not made much money in the nineties, but each of the five partners retired with a comfortable fortune. Mr March was just thirty-two. As the three of us sat at lunch he was talking of that time.

  ‘I was still a bachelor,’ he said, ‘I thought I possessed enough for my requirements. But it was a pity, a firm like ours terminating after a hundred years. I sometimes think we should have continued. But we hadn’t improved our position noticeably since my father died. Of course if I had been like him, I should have carried on successfully. But I didn’t do much. My temperament was quite unsuitable for business. I was too shy and anxious.’

  He was accepting himself as always, but his eyes did not leave Charles and he was speaking with regret. Success, in the world of his father and uncles, meant multiplying one’s fortune and adding to one’s influence among solid men. Mr March, not valuing it as much as they did, knew nevertheless that he would have pursued it if his temperament had not let him down; he would have kept the firm going, or joined others, as his brother Philip had done. While in fact he had come to terms with himself and retired. He had been happier, he had followed his nature; but he made no excuses, and it meant admitting to himself that, compared with those others, he was not so good a man.