The Conscience of the Rich (38 page)

The minutes ticked on. Sir Philip complained: ‘It can’t take a fellow all this time to walk round from Downing Street. These messengers have been slackers ever since I’ve known them.’

At length we heard a shuffle, a mutter of voices, in the secretary’s room. A tap on the door, and Williams came in, carrying a red oblong despatch box.

‘This has just come from the Prime Minister, sir.’ He placed it on the table in front of Sir Philip. The red lid glowed under the lamp.

Sir Philip said sharply: ‘Well, well, where is the key?’

‘Surely you have it, sir?’

‘Never, man, I’ve never had it. I remember giving it to you the last time a box arrived. After I opened it, I remember giving it to you perfectly well.’

‘I’m certain that I remember your keeping the key after you opened that box, sir. I’m almost certain you put it on your key ring–’

‘I tell you I’ve never had the key in my possession for a single moment. You’ve been in charge of it ever since you’ve been in that office. I want you to find it now–’

Williams had blushed to his neck and ears. For him that was the intolerable moment of the morning. He went out. Sir Philip and Mr March were left to look at the red box glowing under the light. Sir Philip swore bitterly.

It was some minutes before Williams returned. ‘I’ve borrowed this’ – he said, giving a small key to Sir Philip – ‘from Sir —’ (the Cabinet Minister).

‘Very well, very well. Now you’d better go and find mine.’ Williams left before Sir Philip had opened the box and the envelope inside. As soon as he began to read, his expression gave the answer.

‘It’s the sack, of course,’ he said.

He spoke slowly: ‘He’s pretty civil to me. He says that I shan’t mind giving up my job to a younger man.’

He added: ‘I didn’t bank on going out like this.’

Mr March said: ‘Nor did I ever think you would.’

Then Sir Philip spoke as though he were recalling his old, resilient tone. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a good deal to clear up today. I want to leave things shipshape. You’ll look after that fellow Getliffe, Eliot? We don’t want any more talk. This will be in the papers tonight. After that they’ll forget about me soon enough.’

In the middle of this new active response, he seemed to feel back to his brother’s remark. He said to Mr March with brotherly, almost protective kindness: ‘Don’t take it too much to heart, Leonard. It might be worse.’

‘I’m grateful for your consideration,’ cried Mr March. ‘But it would never have happened but for my connections.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Sir Philip. ‘That’s as may be.’

He spoke again to his brother, stiffly but kindly: ‘I know you feel responsible because of Charles’ wife. That young woman’s dangerous, and we shan’t be able to see much of her in the family after this. But I shouldn’t like you to do anything about Charles on my account. It can’t be any use.’

Mr March said: ‘Nothing can be any use now.’

Sir Philip said: ‘Well, then. Leave it alone.’

Mr March replied, in a voice firm, resonant, and strong: ‘No. I must do what I have to do.’

As soon as we left the office, Mr March reminded me that I was to come home with him to get Getliffe’s last letter. He was quick and energetic in his movements; the slowness of despair seemed to have left him; outside in the street, he called for a taxi at the top of his voice, and set off in chase of it like a young man.

We drove down Whitehall. Mr March remarked: ‘I presume this is the last occasion when I shall go inside those particular mausoleums. I cannot pretend that will be a hardship for me personally. Though for anyone like my brother Philip, who had ambitions in this direction, it must be an unpleasant wrench to leave.’

I was amazed at his matter-of-fact tone, at the infusion of cheerfulness and heartiness which I had not heard in him for many weeks. He had spoken of his brother with his old mixture of admiration, envy, sense of unworthiness, and detached incredulity, incredulity that a man should choose such a life. He had spoken as he might have done in untroubled days. It was hard to remember his silent anguish an hour before in Sir Philip’s room. He said: ‘I shall want to speak to my son Charles this morning.’

His tone was still matter-of-fact. He said that he would ring Charles up as soon as he got home. Then he talked of other things, all the way to Bryanston Square. The end had come and he was released. He was flooded by a rush of power. He could go through with it, he knew. He could act as though of his own free will. It set him speaking cheerfully and heartily.

He took me into his study. He gave me Getliffe’s letter and said casually: ‘I hope you will be able to settle the fellow for us.’ Then he asked: ‘Are you sufficiently familiar with my son’s efforts as a practitioner to know where he is to be found at this time in the morning?’ It was ten past twelve.

‘He’s usually back from his rounds about half past,’ I said.

‘I will telephone him shortly,’ said Mr March. ‘I shall require to see him before luncheon.’

He asked me to excuse him, and rang up, not Charles, but the family solicitor. Mr March said that he needed to transact some business in the early afternoon. The solicitor tried to put off the appointment until later in the day, but Mr March insisted that it must be at half past two. ‘I shall be having luncheon alone,’ he said on the telephone. ‘I propose to come directly afterwards to your office. My business may occupy a considerable portion of the afternoon.’

When that was settled, Mr March talked to me for a few minutes. He enquired, with his usual consideration, about my career, but for the most part he wanted to talk of Charles. What would his future be? What society was he intending to move in? Would he make any headway as a practitioner? I told him about the letter to the
Lancet
. Even at that moment, he was full of pride. ‘Not that I expect for a minute it is of any value,’ he said. ‘But nevertheless it shows that he may not be prepared to vegetate.’ He sat and considered, on his lips a sad but genuine smile, with no trace of rancour.

‘It would be a singular circumstance,’ said Mr March, ‘if he contributed something after all.’

It was time for him to ring up Charles. When he got an answer, his expression suddenly became fixed. I guessed that he was hearing Ann’s voice. ‘This is Leonard March,’ he said, not greeting her. ‘I wish urgently to speak to my son.’ There was a pause before he spoke to Charles. ‘If it is not inconvenient for you, I should like you to come here without delay.’ Mr March did not say any more to Charles. To me he said: ‘No doubt it is inconvenient for him, my requiring his presence in this manner.’ He paused. ‘But I shall make no further demands upon his time.’

Mr March stood up, shook my hand, and said: ‘I hope you will forgive me, Lewis, for not inviting you to stay to luncheon. I shall have certain matters to attend to for the remainder of the day.’

He added: ‘If you wish to stay in order to see my son, I hope you will not be deterred from doing so. I think you are familiar enough with my house to make yourself at home. I should be sorry if you ceased to be familiar with my house. I shall be obliged if you find it possible to visit me occasionally.’

I went into the drawing-room, affected by the other times I had waited there. I sat by the fire, picked up a biography, and tried to read. The soft rain fell in the square outside. The light of the wet autumn day was diffuse and gentle, and the fire burned high in the chimney. I heard Charles’ car drive up, and the sound of the butler’s voice greeting him in the hall.

Again I tried to read. But, within a few minutes, far sooner than I expected, Charles joined me. He said: ‘Mr L told me that I should find you here.’

He sat down, and looked at me with a tired, composed smile.

He said: ‘He did it with great dignity.’

He said no more of their last meeting.

He began to talk, practically, about his financial condition. Ann’s income would go down now that her father had retired. Charles himself was earning about £900 a year from his practice. ‘It ought to mount up in the next two or three years,’ he said. ‘But I shall be lucky if I work it up to £1,000. Altogether, it will be slightly different from the scale of life I was brought up to expect.’

He smiled. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter much,’ he said. ‘It may be a nuisance sometimes not to have a private income – you used to say what a difference it made, didn’t you? I don’t mean for luxuries. I mean there are times when it’s valuable for a doctor to be independent of his job. He can do things and say things that otherwise he wouldn’t dare. Some of us ought to be able to say things without being frightened for our livelihood, don’t you agree? Well, I shan’t be able to. I don’t know how much difference it will make.’

He was showing the kind of realistic worry that I had seen in him so often. It was genuine; for most of his life he had expected that when Mr March died he would become a rich man; he had always lived in comfort, even since his marriage.

He did not restrain his worry. He was not in a hurry to leave his father’s house. He spoke about Mr March with a concern so strong and steady that one could not miss it.

‘He mustn’t be left alone more than anyone can help,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve done this, so I can’t do anything for him now. But everyone must see that he’s got plenty to catch his interest. He finds it hard to be desperately unhappy when there are people round him, you know that, don’t you? Even though–’ Charles paused. ‘Even though he’s lost something. He can’t be swallowed up by unhappiness while there are people round him. He has to expend himself on them.’

His face was tired, kind. He went on: ‘I know it’s a different story when he is alone at night.’

He reiterated his concern: ‘They mustn’t be frightened to intrude on him. When he’s unhappy, I mean. It’s easy to be too delicate. Sometimes it’s right. I assure you it isn’t right with Mr L I think Katherine will know that by instinct. If she doesn’t, you must tell her, Lewis. Will you promise to tell her?’

‘I’m cut off from them,’ he added. ‘I can’t tell them what to do. But I think I know him better than they do.’

Behind his worry, behind his concern, he was thinking of what he had done.

‘I’ve done this,’ he said, repeating the phrase he had used as he gave me messages about his father. ‘I’ve done this. Sometimes I can’t believe it. It sounds ridiculous, but I feel I’ve done nothing.’ He gave a smile, completely open, unguarded, and candid. I had never seen his face so brilliant and innocent.

‘At other times,’ he said, ‘I feel remorse.’

The words weighed down. I said: ‘I know what you mean. I’ve told you, once I did something more unforgivable than you’ve done. I know what you mean.’

Charles said eagerly: Sometimes it seems the most natural thing in the world to do what one did, isn’t that true? Didn’t you feel that? And sometimes you felt you wouldn’t forget it, you wouldn’t be free of the memory, for the rest of your life?’

‘I’m not free yet,’ I said.

We smiled. There was great intimacy between us.

‘Did yours seem like mine? Did it seem you were bound to make a choice? Did it seem you had to hurt one or two people, whatever you did?’

‘I hadn’t any justification at all,’ I said.

‘With me,’ said Charles, ‘it seemed to be wrapped up with everything in my life.’

He waited for some time before he spoke again. His expression was heavy, but not harassed. ‘Until it happened, I didn’t know what I should have to live with. Live with in myself, I mean: you must have faced that too, haven’t you?’ He looked at me with simplicity, with a kind of brotherly directness. He said: ‘I suppose I don’t know yet.’

Did it make nonsense to him of what he had tried to do with his life? More than any of us, I was thinking, he had searched into his own nature, and had distrusted it more. Did this make nonsense of what he had tried to do? To him the answer would sometimes, and perhaps often, be yes.

Sitting with him in the drawing-room, I could not feel it so. Not that I was trying to judge him: all I had was a sense of expectancy, curiously irrelevant, but reassuring as though the heart were beating strongly, about what the future held.

Some weeks later I went to dinner at Bryanston Square. As I heard from Katherine, Mr March was inventing excuses to keep his house full; that night he had chosen to celebrate what he regarded as a success of mine. The ‘success’ was nothing but a formality: I had just been confirmed in my college job and now, if I wanted, could stay there for life. For Mr March it was a pretext for a party; as he greeted me it seemed to be something more.

When the butler showed me into the drawing-room, cosy after the cold night outside, Mr March had already come down, and was standing among Francis and Katherine and a dozen or more of our contemporaries. It was the biggest party I had seen there since his seventieth birthday. He came across to me, swinging his arm, and the instant he shook hands, said without any introduction: ‘I always viewed your intention to support yourself by legal practice as misguided.’

It sounded brusque. It sounded unemollient. Taken aback, Katherine said: ‘He was doing well in it, after all, Mr L.’

‘No! No!’ He brushed her aside, and spoke straight to me: ‘I didn’t regard legal practice as a suitable career for someone with other burdens.’

He spoke with understanding. Although he had not once referred to it, he knew what my marriage meant: this was his way of telling me so. How much time – he broke off shyly – did I intend to devote to my London job? Three days a week, I told him: and I could feel him thinking that that was the amount of time I spent with my wife in the Chelsea house. ‘Oh well,’ he remarked, ‘so long as that brings in sufficient for your requirements.’

As with Francis, so with me, Mr March ignored any earnings from academic life. His tone had not altered; apart from the burst of sympathy, which no one else in the room recognized, he was talking as he used to do. At dinner he went on addressing us round the table, just as he had done on my earliest visits there. The only difference that I should have noticed, if I had not known what had happened, was a curious one: the food, which had always been good, was now luxurious. Mr March, living alone in Bryanston Square, was doing himself better than ever in the past.