by C. P. Snow
Philip had told him that among the names being mentioned was Philip’s own.
Mr March was puzzled and distressed, more lost than angry. He would have liked to explode into rage, and dismiss the scandal as ‘mischievious nonsense invented by agitators for their own purposes’. He had begun so, that morning: but stopped suddenly when he found Sir Philip fretted and impatient.
‘I have never seen my brother Philip so much affected by any incident in his public life,’ said Mr March. ‘I was inclined at first to attribute his depressed state to his disease, but I was forced to realize that he is sick in mind apart from his physical discomfort. I had never realized that he was capable of being sick in mind. From the earliest time I can remember, I always envied him as not being vulnerable to the weaknesses that afflicted me.’
He was profoundly shaken at having to console Philip – Philip, whom throughout their lives he had thought self-sufficient. He went on: ‘I do not profess to understand why he should take this criminal nonsense so much to heart. I did not need to be assured by my eldest brother that he had not taken advantage of his official position. But he was sufficiently overwrought to insist on assuring me that he had completely given up any transactions of any kind whatsoever since he re-entered the government and that he had not made a single purchase of stock for the last twelve months.’
Philip had said that he did not know whether the stories of Herbert Getliffe’s recent coups were true or not. Mr March was mystified by these stories, and so was I. Was there anything in them?
It was in both our minds how Philip had taken action against Getliffe at the time of Katherine’s marriage.
I promised Mr March that I would try to find out what Getliffe had been up to. It was not such an easy job for me as it would have been once. Since my marriage four years before, I had left Getliffe’s chambers; I had given up legal practice and spent half my time teaching law at Francis Getliffe’s college and the other half in London as a consultant to a big firm.
I promised also that I would try to find out who was spreading the gossip, and why.
I began to realize that, of all Mr March’s anxieties, that was the deepest. From all he had picked up, the gossip had originated with people who were familiar with Getliffe and his circle. Perhaps they were familiar with Sir Philip and his colleagues too: that did not seem so clear. It sounded like Ronald Porson: yet the scandal had, according to Philip, been started by the extreme left. It was not just malicious gossip, it was no more nor less than a piece of politics, he said. From what Mr March had heard of Porson, that ruled him out.
Mr March concealed his thoughts from me: but after a time I had no doubt – he was dark with a suspiciousness that seemed quite unrealistic, with a fear that seemed on the edge of paranoia – that he was thinking of Ann.
It was this fear, I was sure next day, that drove him to see Charles.
I had promised to make enquiries about Getliffe within twenty-four hours and return to Bryanston Square for dinner on the night following; when I arrived, I found Mr March and Charles alone in the drawing-room. There was a silence as though neither had spoken for some minutes. Mr March roused himself, and said: ‘I asked my son to join us for dinner. As you see, he has found it possible to do so.’
Charles said: ‘It happens to be a good night for me, Mr L. My partner is always at home on Wednesdays.’
Mr March did not reply. Charles looked at me with a frown, enquiring and concerned. It was clear that Mr March had not yet spoken.
We went into the dining-room with little conversation. Charles made an effort to get Mr March talking, and himself told a story of Katherine: Mr March sat absently at the head of the table.
Suddenly, Mr March said: ‘Lewis, I should like to learn the results of your investigations.’
‘I’m afraid they haven’t got anywhere yet,’ I said. ‘Herbert Getliffe is out of London. He’ll be back early next week, and I’ve arranged to see him then. I’m also trying to see Porson on the same day.’
Mr March inclined his head.
‘I know that in the circumstances you will not permit any unnecessary delay.’ He turned to Charles. ‘You realize what I am referring to?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Charles.
‘It is desirable that I should enlighten you,’ said Mr March. ‘My brother Philip is being attacked by scurrilous gossip from various sources. This attack appears to be aimed at his personal honour and his public position. It is connected, in some way about which I am not in a position to give you precise details, with the speculations of my son-in-law Francis Getliffe’s brother. Anyone in my family will recollect a previous occasion on which that subject exercised a certain importance. My brother is being attacked for similar mispractices, though in his case they would be more reprehensible, since they would imply that he took advantage of his official position for these purposes.’
Mr March stopped, then asked in a loud harsh voice: ‘I wish to ask you, what do you know of these attacks?’
‘Nothing. Nothing whatever,’ said Charles. His tone was unresentful, almost amused, and utterly candid. ‘They sound very improbable.’
Mr March’s relief was manifest and radiant. Then his face darkened again.
‘I take it, your wife is still active politically?’
Charles looked surprised; it was years since they had argued over Ann’s beliefs: in those days, Mr March had spoken as though her politics were academic. Nevertheless Charles replied at once: ‘Yes, she is.’
‘I am very sorry to hear it.’
Mr March was looking absent and sombre again.
Charles said, in a considerate, respectful, but unyielding tone: ‘I ought to say that I think she’s doing good most of the time.’
By that year, men like Charles and Francis Getliffe and me had not much doubt about what was in store. It seemed to us that there was no choice except war with Hitler – or rather that any other choice was going to be worse than the war. That conviction was separating us from our elders, even those we liked, such as Mr March and Sir Philip.
In the struggle, which was growing bitter, we felt that Ann and her party were on our side. While Sir Philip went confidently about Whitehall and talked to the family on Friday nights as though their world were invulnerable, placid, and permanent. Both he and Mr March were men of judgement: they were more detached and realistic than most of their class: they were Jews. But they could not believe what was coming. To us, they seemed often not to care.
Mr March did not reply to Charles, but asked abruptly: ‘What does your wife know of these attacks?’
‘I should think as little as I do.’ Charles’ tone was once more open and candid, so candid that Mr March was entirely reassured.
Charles asked for the full story, and Mr March told it him: as he spoke, Mr March’s manner had become animated, but he finished: ‘I must impress on you, that my brother Philip takes this with the utmost seriousness. My first inclination was not to give it serious attention. But my brother’s demeanour made me adopt a different attitude.’
‘I don’t understand him,’ said Charles. ‘It wouldn’t be hard to make up a good many kinds of attack on Uncle Philip: but, if I’d been thinking of something improbable, I couldn’t have invented anything as improbable as this.’ He was speaking light-heartedly. He asked more questions about Getliffe, some of them sarcastic, so that Mr March chuckled. He went on: ‘About Uncle Philip – aren’t all people in public life absurdly sensitive to the slightest breath of criticism? Isn’t that the explanation? Don’t you really think that Uncle Philip sticks his Press cuttings into an album every morning before he gets up? If you are as interested as that in your public personality, it must be uncomfortable when people are blackguarding you – even on singularly fantastic grounds. It’s that kind of discomfort he’s frightened of, don’t you admit it?’
Mr March broke into laughter. He had become carefree in a way that made his black anxiety of a quarter of an hour before difficul
t to bring back to mind. He was, in fact, carefree as I had not seen him in his son’s presence for years past. The last few minutes – after Charles showed his ignorance of the attacks – had seemed like the first days I saw them together. Mr March’s cares were dispelled; he grinned at his son’s teasing, he paid it back with teasing of his own. It was like old days. As we said good night, Mr March remarked cheerfully to Charles: ‘You’re making a frightful ass of yourself, living in your unsalubrious abode by the river, I refuse to accept any responsibility for the effects on your health. But I’m always glad to see you in my house.’
30: A Walk From Bryanston Square to Pimlico
It was a fine, warm night, and Charles and I decided to walk home. I had a house in Chelsea by this time, and so we could go the same way. As we crossed over to the park, Charles said: ‘You’d heard all this commotion about Uncle Philip before?’
I told him that it had begun at the birthday party. ‘It’s a curious story,’ he said.
He was not actively interested. He was sorry that Philip should be disturbed, but he did not feel himself involved. I thought of asking him to mention it to Ann, and considered that it was wiser not to. Soon he changed the subject.
The night air was soft, the park was spotted with couples lying mouth-to-mouth. We walked slowly, tired and comfortably relaxed. With the pleasure of an old intimacy, we talked as we had not done for years. Of our marriages, so different in all that had happened to us and yet both childless. ‘Yes,’ said Charles, with comradeship, ‘it will be sad if neither of us leaves a son to follow him.’
We talked of our careers, and for the first time Charles told me how he felt about being a doctor. We had just left the park, and were waiting to cross the road at the end of Piccadilly. Cars were hooting by, and Charles had to pause until he could make himself heard.
‘Often I’ve disliked it strongly, of course,’ he said. ‘More often I’ve found it extremely dull. You’d expect so, wouldn’t you? There’s a fair amount of human interest, of course, but one’s got to be patient to get even that. A GP isn’t dealing continually with crises of life and death, you know. Nine-tenths of his time he’s seeing people with colds and nerves and indigestion and rheumatism. That’s the basis of the job, and if you’re looking for human interest, people exhibit slightly less of it when they’ve a bad cold than when they haven’t.’
As we walked down Grosvenor Place, Charles went on: ‘A doctor has his moments, but most of his time it can’t be interesting. It just can’t. The percentage of ordinary workaday tedium is bound to be high. And I suspect that’s true of any job, isn’t it? One always hears them described with their high moments heightened a bit; it’s nice to hear, but it’s quite different when you begin living them. Don’t you agree? Don’t you admit that’s true? Look, Lewis, you possess a great capacity for getting interest out of what you’re doing: I’ve never met anyone with a greater: but tell the truth, isn’t your own job – aren’t the various jobs you’ve tackled – mostly tedious when you come to live them?’
We argued for a time. Charles said: ‘Anyway, doctoring is tedious for nine hours out of every ten. Anyone who tells you it isn’t either doesn’t know what excitement is or suffers from an overdose of romantic imagination. And for me it’s also tedious in rather a different way. I don’t think you’ll sympathize much with this. But I mean that it doesn’t give me anything hard to bite on mentally. I’ve got a taste for thinking: but I shouldn’t be any worse a doctor if I were a much more stupid man.’
Since we began our walk, he had been talking without guard. He was not trying to protect or disguise himself, and at this point he did not attempt to conceal his intellectual arrogance, his certainty of his own intellectual power, his regret as he felt that power rusting.
‘So you see,’ Charles gave a smile. ‘I’m resigned to being distinctly bored for the rest of my life.’
‘But there are compensations,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘there are compensations.’
‘There are compensations,’ he repeated. ‘Each month I count up my earnings very carefully. Last month I made over eighty pounds – if they all pay me. You’ve no idea how pleasant it is to earn your own living. It’s a pleasure you can only really appreciate if you’ve been supported in luxury ever since you were born.’ He smiled broadly, and added:
‘There are other compensations too. People show such confidence in one. It’s nice to be able to justify that sometimes. Once or twice in the last few weeks I’ve felt some use.’
We had crossed in front of Victoria Station and came out into Wilton Road. I asked: ‘Charles, if you had your time again, would you make the same choice?’
‘Without any doubt,’ he said.
I looked at him under the light of a street lamp. He had become older than any of us. He was carrying a mackintosh; he was stooping more than he used to. At that moment – while he was saying, his eyes glinting maliciously at his own expense: ‘If I had my time again, I might not even take quite so long to make up my mind’ – I was moved back to the evening in Regent Street long ago, when we argued about goodness. I felt the shock that assails one as one suddenly sees an intimate in a transfiguring light, the shock of utter familiarity and utter surprise. Here was Charles, whom I knew so well, whom I took for granted with the ease of a long friendship – and at the same time, I was thinking with incredulity, as though I had never met him before, what a curious choice he had made.
In Antrobus Street the light was glowing over the night-bell. We said good-night in front of his house, and I began to walk west along the Embankment. The night was so caressingly warm that I wanted to linger, looking at the river. There was an oily swell on the dark water, and on the swell the bands of reflected light slowly swayed. I could see the red and green eyes of lamps on the bridges up the river. I stayed there, watching the bands of light sway on the water, and, as I watched, among the day-dreams drifting through my mind were memories and thoughts about Charles.
The river smell was carried on a breath of air. Down towards Chelsea the water glistened and a red light flashed. Leaning on the Embankment, I thought that, in a different time, when the conscience of the rich was not so sick, Charles might not have sacrificed himself, at least not so completely. Some of his abnegation one could attribute to his time, just as some of his surface quirks, his outbursts of arrogance and diffidence, one could attribute to his being born a Jew.
But none of that seemed to me to matter very much, compared with what I thought I had seen in him, walking in the Wilton Road half an hour before.
I thought I had seen a nature which, at the deepest, was never sure of love. Never sure of receiving it: perhaps never sure of giving it: vulnerable and at the same time resenting any approach.
It was the kind of nature which could have broken his life – for men with that flaw at the root often spend their lives in pursuing unrequited love, or indulging their cruelty on others, or tormenting themselves with jealousy, or retiring into loneliness and spiritual pride. But in Charles this deepest self was housed in a temperament in all other respects strong, active, healthy, full of vigour. It was that blazing contrast which I had seen, or imagined that I had seen.
Perhaps it was that contrast which made him want to search for the good.
He had always been fascinated by the idea of goodness. Was it because he was living constantly with a part of himself which he hated? To know what goodness means, perhaps one needs to have lain awake at night, hating one’s own nature. The sweet, the harmonious, the untempted, have no reason to hate their natures; it is the others, the guilty or the sadic – it seemed to me most of all the sadic – who are driven to find what goodness is.
But men like Charles did not find it in themselves. It was not as easy as all that. He wanted to be good; so his active nature led him to want to do good. He was living a useful life now – but that was all. No one felt that as a result he had reached a state of goodness: he never felt it for a moment himse
lf. He knew that, with his insight and sarcastic honesty. He would have liked to feel goodness in himself – he would have liked to believe that others felt it. But he knew that in fact others often felt a sense of strain, because he was acting against part of his nature. They did not feel he was apt for a life of abnegation. They distrusted his conscience, and looked back with regret to the days before it dominated him – to the days, indeed, in which they remembered him as gay, malicious, idle, brilliant.
I looked down at the water, not wanting to drag myself away. I had never felt more fond of him, and into my thoughts there flickered and passed scenes in which he had taken part, the night of our examination years before, quarrels in Bryanston Square, a glimpse of him walking with his arm round Ann. I thought I had seen in him that night some of the goodness he admired. But not in the way he had searched for it. Instead, there was a sparkle of good in the irony with which he viewed his own efforts; in the disillusioned certainty with which he knew that he at least was right to be useful, that he could have chosen no other way, even if it now seemed prosaic, lacking in the radiance which others attained by chance.
Most of all there was a sparkle of good in the state to which his struggle with his own nature had brought him. He could still hate himself. Through that hatred, and not through his conscience, through the nights when he had lain awake darkened by remorse, he had taken into his blood the sarcastic astringent experience of life which shone out of him as he comforted another’s self-reproach and lack of self-forgiveness.
31: A Success and a Failure
I did not see Mr March again before the day I had arranged to meet Herbert Getliffe, but I received an anxious note, saying that he hoped I would persevere with my enquiries and relieve his mind as soon as I had information. The lull of reassurance was over and his worry was nagging at him again. There were few states more infectious than anxiety, I thought, as I walked through the courts to Getliffe’s chambers, with an edge to my own nerves.
