The Conscience of the Rich (28 page)

‘Oh yes.’

‘Didn’t you see what it was going to mean?’

She was unmoved. ‘Not everything, no,’ she said.

‘I can’t understand what you were trying to do.’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘how much I can tell you.’

‘I don’t even understand what the line is,’ I said.

Deliberately I was using a bit of her own jargon. She looked at me, knowing that I was not unsophisticated politically, knowing that I had an idea how ‘the party’ went about its work.

She began to explain, keeping back little, so far as I could judge, though some of the manoeuvres still puzzled me. The ‘line’, she said, I ought to know: it was to get rid of this government and rally all the anti-fascists to do so, whoever they were, Churchillites, middle-of-the-roaders, labour people, intellectuals. Unless we did just that, this government would sell the pass altogether, she said. Unless we got rid of it, Hitler and his fascists would have power on a scale no one had had before: that meant the end of us all, liberals and men of good will, Gentiles and Jews.

‘Jews first,’ said Ann in a neutral tone. ‘Mr March and his friends might remember that.’

She looked at me and said: ‘The point is, we’ve got to get people acting now. You can’t disagree about that, can you?’

‘No,’ I said. I was speaking out of conviction. ‘I can’t disagree with that.’

‘There isn’t much time,’ she said.

That was where the
Note
got its orders. Its job was to damage personal credit: it was to chase any scandal anywhere near the government, or even the chance of any scandal. It was not to run straight into libels, but it would take risks that an ordinary newspaper would not. Oddly enough, it was better placed than an ordinary newspaper to collect some kinds of scandal: Ann and another colleague and Seymour himself most of all had acquaintances deep in official society, at nearly all levels except at the very top.

Yet, I began to ask her, what were they hoping for? A few thousand cyclostyled sheets – what was the circulation of the paper?

‘Nineteen thousand,’ she said.

A bit of scandal going to a few thousand people – what was the use of that?

‘It helps,’ she said. Once more she spoke without expression, with the absence of outward emotion which had surprised, and indeed harassed me, since I arrived. Nevertheless I felt within her a kind of satisfaction which those who only look on at politics never reach. It was a satisfaction made up of a sense of action, of love of action, and of humility. It did not occur to her to argue that the
Note
’s significance was greater than it seemed, that its public was an influential one, that what it said in its messy sheets got round. No: this was the job she had been set, and she was devoted to it. It was as humble as that.

Early in the year, she told me, someone had collected a piece of gossip about Hawtin, the man Mr March had mentioned. Hawtin, like Sir Philip, was a parliamentary secretary: but, unlike Sir Philip, he was not an old man getting his last job, but a young one on the rise. He also happened to be a focus of detestation for the left. The gossip was that he had made money because he knew where an armaments contract was to be placed. But Seymour and his friends, Ann said, could not prove it. They could not get at him; they tried all their usual sources, but found nothing to go on. I gathered that one or two of their sources were shady, and some not so much shady as irregular in a most unexpected way: I was almost sure they had an informant in the civil service. When they were at a loss, someone discovered that Hawtin, who was a lawyer by profession, had once had business dealings with Herbert Getliffe. It was then that Ann recalled what she had heard against Getliffe years before. At once she brought out the stories in the
Note
office: this had been a real scandal, she could track it down and get it tied and labelled.

‘Why didn’t you remember?’ I said.

‘What was there to remember?’

‘Didn’t you think how Philip March’s name kept coming in, when we were all worried before Katherine’s wedding?’

‘I didn’t give it a thought,’ she replied.

‘Why not?’

‘I had plenty of things against him, but I could never have imagined he’d have got mixed up in a wretched business like this, could you have done?’

I took her at her word. I asked her:

‘But you must have imagined that if you dug up the Getliffe affair–’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you did that, it was coming close to home.’

I meant that it would damage Katherine through her husband: Ann knew what I meant, and did not pretend.

‘I thought of that, of course I did. But we wanted the exact dope on Getliffe just as a lead-in to the job. It was a good time ago, I didn’t think we should want to use it.’

‘Did you think there was a risk?’

She looked straight at me.

‘Yes, I thought there was a risk. I didn’t think it was very real.’

‘Are they going to use it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘How possible?’

‘It’s just about as likely as not.’

All the time I had been with her, I had had a feeling that I scarcely knew her at all. It was not her politics that struck so strange : I expected all that. I expected her sense of duty. It was not that she had been unfriendly or ambiguous. On the contrary, she had been precise, direct, completely in command of herself. It had been I who was showing the temper and wear-and-tear. What made her seem so strange was just that control. Her voice had not given a quiver of strain. Her head had stayed erect, unnaturally still, as though the muscles of her neck were stiff.

To my astonishment, she did not know the exact position about the original Getliffe scandal. Porson had refused to tell her the details, and she had not discovered them from anyone else: when she failed, the
Note
had set another person on the same search. It was characteristic of them that she had not been told whom he had been talking to, or whether he had got all the facts. I asked again if the
Note
were going to use the story. She gave the same answer as before.

‘Can it be stopped?’ I broke out. ‘I could go to Humphrey Seymour–’

‘You’d better not waste any time.’

‘I don’t want to go unless it’s necessary.’

She meant: this was her work, these people were her allies, it was bitter to get in their way.

‘It’s irresponsible,’ I said, ‘not to go to him at once.’

‘We’ve got different ideas of responsibility, haven’t we?’

‘Not so completely different,’ I said. ‘If your people really begin splashing Philip March’s name about, you know what it will mean.’

‘I haven’t any special concern for Philip,’ she said. ‘He’s a reactionary old man. If he has had his fingers in this business, then he deserves what comes to him.’

‘I wasn’t thinking so much of him.’ I paused. ‘But Mr March?’

She replied: ‘You know what happened between us. Since then I haven’t felt that he had any claim on me.’

I paused again. Then I said: ‘Have you thought what it would mean for Charles?’ Her eyes stayed steady, looking into mine. For a second I totally misread her face. She had spoken of Mr March in a reasonable tone, but one hardened, I thought, with resentment, the memory of an injustice still fresh. Her eyes were sparkling; she seemed just about to smile. Instead her throat and cheeks reddened: her brow went smooth with anger. At last her control had broken, and she said:

‘I won’t tolerate any interference between Charles and me. Go and make your own wife love you as much as I love Charles. If she’s capable of recognizing who you are. Then I might listen to anything you say about my marriage.’

I did not speak.

Ann said: ‘I’m sorry. That was an unforgivable thing to say.’

Slowly – I was not thinking of her or Charles – I replied: ‘You wouldn’t have said it unless–’ I stopped, my own thoughts ran away with me. I made another effort: ‘Unless you were afraid of what you might do to Charles.’

We both sat silent. I was leaning forward, my chin in my hands. I scarcely noticed that she had crossed the room until I felt her arm round my shoulders.

‘I’m desperately sorry,’ she said.

I tried to talk to her again.

‘I still think,’ I said, ‘that you ought to speak to Seymour pretty soon.’

‘It’s not easy. Don’t you see it’s not easy?’

I told her that she would have to do it. She pressed my hand and went back to her chair. We sat opposite each other, not speaking again, until Charles came in.

She sprang up. He took her in his arms and kissed her. She asked how the surgery had gone. He told her something about a case, his arms still round her, and asked about herself. They were absorbed in each other. No one could have seen them that night without being moved by the depth and freshness of their love.

Over his shoulder Charles glanced at me, sitting in the pool of light from the reading-lamp.

‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘You’re looking pale.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I tell you, it’s nothing. No, I’ve been talking to Ann about this Getliffe business.’

He glanced at Ann. ‘I expected that was it,’ he said. They sat side by side on the sofa. Without waiting for any kind of preliminaries, I said: ‘I’ve been telling Ann she ought to go straight to Seymour.

To my astonishment, Charles began to smile.

‘Why is that funny?’ I was on edge.

‘Did you know he was at school with me? It’s strange, I shouldn’t have guessed that he’d crop up again–’

He was still smiling at what seemed to be a memory.

‘I’m quite sure,’ I said, ‘that Ann ought to go round to the
Note
tomorrow.’

‘That’s getting a bit frantic, isn’t it?’ Charles said, in a friendly tone.

I could not help overstating my case. ‘Tomorrow,’ I repeated, getting more emphatic because I could not find a reason.

‘You don’t want to go along unless it’s the last resort, do you?’ said Charles to Ann, and their eyes met in trust.

The curious thing was, Charles did not seem much worried. Ann was so torn that she had said something I should not be able to forget. That apart, I was acutely anxious. Yet Charles, who was himself given to anxiety, who had much more foresight than most men, seemed almost immune from what was affecting us. True, he was much further from politics than Ann was, a good deal further even than I was myself. Nevertheless, it was strange to see him so unruffled, giving us the drinks which, in the grip of the argument, Ann had not thought of. With a kind of temperate irritation, he said: ‘I must say, the thing which I really dislike is that we misled Mr L. Quite unintentionally, of course, but it’s the sort of thing any of us would dislike, wouldn’t they?’

He meant, when Mr March told him of the rumours about Sir Philip and he had said that neither he nor Ann had any knowledge of them. It had been true then: at the time, Ann was trying to find out about Getliffe and no one but Getliffe. But it would not have been true a week or two later.

‘I’ve explained the position to him now, of course,’ he said.

‘Did he accept it?’ I asked.

‘As much as he could accept anything,’ said Charles.

‘When did you talk to him?’

Charles gave me the date. I had seen Mr March since, but he had not mentioned a word about it.

‘I also explained Ann’s connection with the
Note
,’ said Charles. ‘I thought it was right to do that.’

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.