The Conscience of the Rich (33 page)

As soon as I caught sight of her I was troubled. She was dressed for the party, as though she had determined to look her best that night. But it was not her dress that took my eye. Her cheeks were flushed; on her forehead there was a frown of strain. At first I took it for granted that these were signs of anxiety because of the evening ahead; then I asked if she were well.

‘I’ve got a cold, I think,’ said Ann. ‘I felt it coming on a day or two ago. It’s nothing much.’

‘Any temperature?’

‘Perhaps a little,’ said Ann.

‘Does Charles know?’

‘No. I told you, I’ve not seen him since I went away.’

‘Wouldn’t it be wiser if you didn’t come?’

‘Do you think,’ Ann said, ‘that I could possibly not come now? I’ve told Mr March that I shall be there, haven’t I?’

Suddenly I was reminded of her making herself play on at tennis, her first afternoon at Haslingfield.

‘I must make sure that no one takes any notice, though,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if anything can be done about it.’ She went upstairs, and was some time away. At last she came into the room, halted in front of me, and said: ‘How will that do?’

She had gone over her make-up, hiding the flush on her cheeks, overpainting her lips. One thing alone she could not wipe away, and that was the constricted, strained expression round her eyes.

‘You look very pretty,’ I said. In our long, comradely acquaintanceship, I had scarcely paid her a compliment before.

She smiled with pleasure. She was vainer than one thought, she distrusted her looks more. She studied herself in the looking-glass over the fireplace. She gave another smile, faint, approving, edged with self-regard.

‘I think it will do,’ she said.

Again I tried to make her stay at home, but she would not listen.

The September night was fresh, and Ann shivered in the taxi. As we stood on the steps in Bryanston Square just before eight o’clock, the smell of fallen leaves in the garden was blown on the sharp wind. Even for myself, I wished that the evening was over.

In the drawing-room, Margaret March and a cousin whom I scarcely knew were sitting by the fire. Ann began to talk to the cousin, who was a shy, gauche youth of twenty. Margaret said to me quietly: ‘I don’t think anyone else is coming. And I accepted before I heard what was happening. Otherwise I think I should have got out of it. Perhaps it would have been behaving grossly, but still–’

Then Charles entered, and she became silent. Before any of us had spoken again, Mr March followed his son into the room.

He felt the silence. He looked at Charles, at Ann, and then at the rest of us. At last he shook hands with Ann in a stiff, constrained manner, and said: ‘I’m glad to have your company on this occasion. I’m glad that you were not prevented from attending.’

Through dinner, he went on as though trying not to disappoint us. He showed no sign of working up to a scene.

He knew he was expected to show pleasure at the birth, and he tried to act it. He talked of Katherine’s children and Katherine herself. He made an attempt, as it were mechanically, to recall the times when ‘my daughter had previously made a frightful ass of herself’.

Everyone at the table knew what he was doing. It was no relief to laugh at the jokes. I could not keep from looking at Charles, whose own glance came back time and again to his father. And I could not keep from looking at Ann; once I noticed Charles anxiously watching her. Glancing often from one to the other, I had to maintain more than my share of the conversation, replying to Mr March’s mechanical chaff.

Margaret March helped, but the cousin was too shy to speak. In that way we got through dinner, though there was one incident, quite trivial, which chilled us all. Mr March’s knife slipped as he was cutting his meat; as he righted himself he knocked his claret glass over. We heard the tinkle, watched the stain seep over the cloth, expecting at any instant that Mr March’s usual extravagant stream-of-consciousness grumbling would begin. But he said nothing. He stared at the cloth while the butler dried it up. He did not make a single complaint to save his face.

In the drawing-room, Mr March again attempted to behave as though this were nothing but a celebration. He told Margaret a story at my expense; as he developed it, he became less preoccupied. Then Margaret March made a tactless remark. For she talked about Katherine’s children, and said, casually but wistfully: ‘If I married, I wonder if I should dare to have a child. I don’t suppose I shall have the chance now, worse luck: but I wonder if I should.’

She was getting on into the mid-thirties. I looked at her handsome face, fair and clean-cut.

She added quietly: ‘Of course, I know that really I should do the same as Katherine. I should want children, I should start a family. But it would worry me. I’m not sure that it would be wise.’

‘Yes,’ said Ann, breaking from her silence with feverish intensity. ‘Of course you’d have children, of course you would.’

Mr March stared at her. Then he turned away to Margaret March.

‘I am not certain that I understand your suggestion,’ he said.

She hesitated: ‘I mean – when you think of what the world may be.’

Mr March shouted: ‘You need not try to respect my feelings. I am not accustomed to having my feelings respected in more important matters. I suppose you mean the world may not be a tolerable place for people of our religion?’

Margaret March nodded.

Mr March cried out: ‘I wish the
Jews
would stop being
news!
’

It was a shout of protest: but somehow he said it as a jingle, and as though they were doing it on purpose. Even that night there were lips being compelled not to smile. Mr March could feel the ripple round him. He scowled and went on: ‘You need not respect my feelings about such matters. I admit I never expected to see my religion getting this deplorable publicity. I never expected to spend my declining years watching people degraded because they belong to the same religion as myself. But I do not consider that these events should compel any of my relations to cripple their lives. I refuse to credit that they can be affected. And if they should be affected, which I repeat is not possible, they would be better off in the company of their children. If their children turn out to be a consolation, and not a source of grief.’

At that moment, Charles started to talk to his father. That last cry sounded in Charles’ ears. The lines of his face became deeper. Across the table he saw the wife whom he adored. He saw her looking strained and ill. With her face before him, he had to speak to his father.

As we listened, nearly everyone there thought there was going to be a reconciliation. It sounded as though he knew which choice must be made. Each word he spoke was affectionate, subtle, concerned. He seemed at first to be talking casually to his father about Haslingfield and Bryanston Square. Yet the words were charged with his feeling for his father, with his family pride, so long concealed, with his longing for privacy and ease with those he loved.

Gradually Charles got Mr March to talk, not in his old vein, but with some show of ease. He soon began to expand on the weather. ‘It’s been remarkable weather this summer,’ said Mr March. ‘Only exceeded in wretchedness in my experience by the summer of 1912, which I always blamed for the regrettable misadventure of the third housemaid. It is the first summer since 1929 when there has been no danger of drought at my house in the country. It is the first summer since 1929 that I have not been compelled to make my guests ration the amount of water in their baths.’ He turned to me. ‘1929 was, of course, singularly difficult. I remember that, on your first visit to my house in the country, I was compelled to allow you a maximum of four inches in your bath. The time I issued those instructions to you was immediately followed by the appearance of Ann Simon after luncheon.’

He did not look at Ann.

The name came as a shock. There was a silence.

Charles recovered himself, and said: ‘It wasn’t a direct consequence, Mr L.’

‘No! No! I’ve always presumed that she was invited through the ordinary channels.’

Mr March was quiet.

‘You’re not certain that anyone has ever been properly invited to any house of yours, are you?’ said Charles.

From his tone, so much more intimate than teasing, I knew that he would not stop trying to persuade Mr March of what he felt.

‘You’ve never been able to trust your children to behave with reasonable decorum, have you?’ Charles went on.

‘That is so,’ said Mr March. ‘As I remarked recently, I ought to have been born in a different epoch.’

‘I think perhaps I ought to have been too,’ said Charles.

‘You’re better prepared to endure unpleasantnesses than I am,’ said Mr March. ‘Whereas I only require to pass my declining years in peace.’

‘I’m not as well prepared as you are, Mr L,’ Charles said. ‘And I don’t like the prospect of the future much more than you do.’

‘I never liked the prospect of any unpleasantness,’ said Mr March. ‘But that’s my temperament, I’ve told you before. I’m a diffident and retiring person.’

‘Don’t you see that our temperaments are very much alike?’ said Charles. His tone suddenly turned urgent and anxious. ‘Even though we seem to do different things. I may do things you wouldn’t have done, but we’re much more alike than most fathers and sons. I wish you’d believe it. At bottom, we’re very similar people. Father, don’t you know that we are?’

A smile forced itself, as though with difficulty, through to Mr March’s face, a smile that became delighted, open, and naïf.

While some of us felt a wave of relief, thought it was all over, felt a sense of relief overwhelming, tired and at the same time sparkling gay, Mr March seemed half-incredulous, half-happy.

He said, in a rapid mutter, that he would like to have a ‘consultation’ with Charles and Ann ‘not later than the end of the present week’.

Charles said yes.

Mr March deliberately changed the conversation, and talked happily to the rest of us, about subjects in which he and we were equally uninterested.

As Charles rose to say goodbye, Ann gave a gasp. As soon as I looked at her, I knew it was a gasp of pain. Charles went to her, asking with extreme anxiety what was the matter.

‘I’m not particularly well,’ she said.

‘You’ve not been well all night,’ he said. He put a hand on her forehead and felt her pulse.

‘Why haven’t you told me?’ he said, in a tone so distressed that it sounded harsh and scolding. He turned to his father. ‘I must get her home at once. Lewis, will you ring my partner and tell him that I shall want him to attend to her?’

Mr March stood up and went to him.

‘Is she ill?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Charles.

‘Is it undesirable to move her?’

Charles hesitated, and before he replied Mr March said in a loud voice: ‘I insist that she stays in my house. I refuse to accept responsibility if you subject her to unnecessary movement.’

‘She would rather be at home,’ said Charles.

‘I cannot regard her inclinations as decisive. I believe that you would make her stay if it were not for previous circumstances. I cannot accept your recent assurances if you find it necessary to remove her from my house now.’

They looked into each other’s eyes. Their faces were transformed from what they had been half an hour before, when Charles made his ‘assurances’ to his father. They were heavy, frowning, distressed.

‘I think I had better stay,’ said Ann, who was lying back below them in her chair.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you tell them to be quick? She ought to be in bed at once,’ said Charles curtly to his father.

Mr March rang for the butler, and said to Charles: ‘If you have no strong objection, I should prefer to send for my practitioner. He is competent as those fellows go, and he can be available without so much delay.’

Before Charles replied, Ann said: ‘Yes, let him come.’

The servants worked at speed. Within five minutes Ann and Charles were out of the room; within ten the car of Mr March’s doctor drew up outside. The rest of us stayed there. We talked perfunctorily. Once or twice Mr March startled us by speaking with animation: then he relapsed into his thoughts.

It was a long time before Charles came back. His face was drained of colour, and he spoke straight to his father. His voice was quiet and hard: ‘It may be a pneumonia. She’s ill.’

A look of recognition passed between them. Mr March did not speak.

I called to ask after her on each of the next two afternoons. On the first day I found Mr March alone, distracted and restless, telling me it was beyond doubt pneumonia, inventing one service after another that he might do for Ann. His car shuttled between Bryanston Square and Pimlico, fetching her belongings; he kept questioning the doctors and nurses; he went out himself to buy her flowers.

On the second afternoon Mr March and Charles both came to see me in the drawing-room. Mr March was still fretting for things that he could do. He behaved as though any action was a relief to his mind: but, when he asked Charles three times in ten minutes what else was needed, he got cold replies. Those replies did not spring simply from suspense. They were cold because of the tension present in the room between them.

In a short time Mr March went out. At once Charles’ whole expression changed; his face became at once less hard and more ravaged. He spoke without any pretence.

‘It will be days before we know that she’s safe. Orange – Mr March’s doctor – says that he wouldn’t have expected it to take hold of her like this.’ He cried out: ‘Lewis, I wish I had her courage.’

‘I’ve often wished that,’ I said.

‘It’s the sort of courage I just can’t compete with,’ Charles said. ‘She won’t stop thinking about this affair of the
Note
. She told me that it was on that account she must know exactly how ill she is. She wouldn’t ask me, but she did ask Orange. She just said that her father and her husband were both doctors, and she wanted to be discussed as though she were a case in front of the class. Mind you,’ he said, with an automatic smile, ‘intelligent people often ask one to do that. It doesn’t prevent one from lying to them.’ He went on: ‘But so far as a human being can, she meant it.’