The Conscience of the Rich (29 page)

Mr March went on: ‘They look remarkably unlike the uglier members of our family. Hannah says that everyone in the family is more presentable when young, but I told her that she must have forgotten Caroline’s children in their infancy.’

Katherine chuckled. She and her father were not only becoming fonder of each other, but the bond of sympathy between them seemed to grow stronger each time I saw them. She was pregnant again, and he had insisted that she came to Haslingfield during July, ‘on the firm undertaking’, as he wrote to her, ‘that you attempt to run the household, though I have never concealed my lack of faith in your abilities in that direction, until a date when your attention is distracted by other developments’.

Actually, she ran the household so that it was more comfortable than I remembered: since her marriage, she had cultivated a talent for comfort. Not even Mr March kept a closer eye on one’s physical whims, frailties, likes and dislikes.

That evening, as we waited before dinner for Mr March, I was presented with a Moselle which she had noticed me enjoy on my first visit to Haslingfield, when Charles and Ann were within a few hours of meeting.

Katherine said: ‘You remember that night, don’t you, Lewis? I was tremendously excited because Francis was coming next day. And you made a remark which might have meant that you guessed I was in love. I lay awake a bit that night wondering whether you really intended it. Francis says that was probably the only sleep he’s ever cost me. But I remind him that it was only for an hour.’

She was content. Her third child was due in early August; with Mr-March-like precision, she announced the probable day with a margin of error plus or minus. Also like Mr March, she harried her doctors, wanted to know the reasons for their actions, and would not be put off by bedside patter. Francis had told me some stories about her that were very much in her father’s line, full of the same physical curiosity and the same assumption that a doctor is someone whose time you pay for, and whose advice you consider rather as you would an electrician’s when he brings a new type of bulb. ‘I don’t believe you treat doctors in her fashion,’ Francis had said, ‘unless you have been born scandalously rich.’

Katherine denied it. But as a rule she was content to follow his lead. Just as she had once accepted her brother’s opinions, now she accepted her husband’s. She had resisted everyone’s attempts to educate her: first Charles’, and then Francis’, with some irregular incursions of my own.

Yet I often felt that she had matured faster than any of us. In a way singularly like her father’s after he retired from business, she had become at twenty-seven completely, solidly, and happily herself.

Her anxieties now were all about her children. Her self-conscious moments were so mild that she laughed at them. After one of her dinner parties she would keep Francis awake wondering if a remark of hers had been misunderstood, and why a pair of guests left at a quarter past ten; she worked round and round her speculations with the family persistence; the habit remained but the edge had gone.

On this night at Haslingfield, though she kept saying every ten minutes: ‘Charles promised to ring up about coming down tomorrow. I’m getting into a state. It will be intolerable if he forgets’, it was nothing but the residue of the old habit.

At last the telephone bell rang in the hall, and the butler told her that Mr Charles was asking for her. Having seen her run to the telephone so many times, I found it strange to wait while she walked upright, slow, eight months gone.

Katherine returned and said that Charles was hoping to come down for dinner on the following night, but would have to get back to London to sleep. ‘Whether that’s because of his practice or Ann I couldn’t tell,’ she said. ‘I should think it’s because of Ann, shouldn’t you?’ Her face became thoughtful and hard. For a moment she looked set, determined, middle-aged. ‘That takes me back again to the first time you came here. You realize that I invited Ann specially for you, don’t you? I definitely hoped you’d make a match of it. I thought she might be attractive enough to distract you from Sheila. I never thought of her for Charles at all.’ She looked at me intently. ‘Well, Lewis, my dear, I believe my scheme might have been better for everyone. I know I oughtn’t to talk about Sheila, but you must realize that your friends hate to see her eating your life away. And on the other hand, if you had married Ann, you would have kept her in order. She wouldn’t have tried to make a different man of you as she’s tried with Charles. Yes, it would have been better if my scheme had come off.’

The warm, wet wind lashed round the house all Sunday, and I spent the whole day indoors. In the morning I talked for an hour with Mr March alone. He said that Philip was now convinced that the gossip had blown itself out, and accordingly did not consider it worth while to discuss ‘ancient history’ in the shape of the Howard & Hazlehurst dealings in 1929. Mr March was left apprehensive. I wished I could have told him that Ann and Charles had settled his worries. But I did say that there might be good news for him soon.

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.

Then Katherine remembered her afternoon mail.

‘The only letter I’ve opened is my husband’s,’ she said comfortably. ‘Being in this state makes me even more lazy than I usually am. Lewis, will you pander to my condition and fetch in the others?’

As I gave them to her, I saw that one was a long foolscap envelope, with her address in green typescript, and I realized that it was her weekly copy of the
Note
.

She read it last. I felt a flicker of uneasiness, nothing more, as she opened the sheets, and went on chatting to Mr March. Suddenly we heard Katherine’s voice, loud and harsh.

‘I think you ought to listen to this, Mr L.’

She read, angrily and deliberately:

‘“
Armaments and Shares
. As foreshadowed in
Note
(Mar. 24 ’36) certain personages close to Government appear interested in armaments programme in more ways than one. Hush-hush talk in Century (exclusive City luncheon club, HQ 22 Farringdon St), Jewish candidates quietly blackballed, president George Wyatt, co-director of Sir Horace (Cartel-spokesman) Timberlake – (see
Note
, Nov. 17 ’35, Feb. 2 ’36, Apr. 15 ’36), that heavy killings made through inside knowledge (official) armaments contracts, both ’35 (Abyssinian phoney scare) and ’29. E.g. ’29 Herbert Getliffe KC employed Jan. 2–June 6, advice WO contract Howard & Hazelhurst: £10,000 worth H & H bought name of G L Paul, May 30, £15,000 worth H & H F E Paul, June 2, G L and F E Paul brothers H Getliffe’s wife. Usual lurkman technique (see
Note
, Feb. 9 ’36). Have junior ministers, names canvassed in Century, also used lurkmen? Allow for Century’s anti-Semitism. But
Note
satisfied background hush-hush scandal. Story, transactions, dates, ministers, later.”’