There was a silence. He went on: ‘I haven’t enjoyed being a Jew. Since I was a child, I haven’t been allowed to forget — that other people see me through different eyes. They label me with a difference that I can’t accept. I know that I sometimes make myself feel a stranger, I know that very well. But still, other people have made me feel a stranger far more often than I have myself. It isn’t their fault. It’s simply a fact. But it’s a fact that interferes with your spirits and nags at you. Sometimes it torments you — particularly when you’re young. I went to Cambridge desperately anxious to make friends who would be so intimate that I could forget it. I was aching for that kind of personal success — to be liked for the person I believed myself to be. I thought, if I couldn’t be liked in that way, there was nothing for it: I might as well go straight back to the ghetto.’
He stopped suddenly, and smiled. He looked very tired, but full of relief.
As I listened, I was swept on by his feeling, and at the same time surprised. I had noticed something, but nothing like all he had credited me with. I had seen him wince before, but took it to be the kind of wound I had known in myself through being born poor; I too had sometimes been looking out for snubs. In me, that was not much of a wound, though: it had never triggered off a passion. Now I was swept along by his, moved and yet with a tinge of astonishment or doubt.
‘What shall you do?’ I said, after a silence. ‘Do you know what your career’s to be?’
‘Most people will assume that I intend to drift round and become completely idle.’
Then I asked if anyone else knew of his abandoning the Bar. He shook his head.
‘Mr L will be disappointed, of course,’ he said.
‘He was talking to me yesterday,’ I said. ‘He was delighted about the case. He’s set his heart on your being a success in the world.’
For a moment, Charles was angry.
‘You’re exaggerating that,’ he said. ‘You forget that he’d get equally excited if any of his relations made a public appearance of any kind.’ Then he added, in a different tone:
‘I hope you’re not right.’
I was startled by the concern which had suddenly entered his voice: he seemed affected more strongly than either of us could explain that night.
6: Full Dinner Party
Within a few days of Charles’ visit, he told me that he had broken the news to Mr March. He also told me how Mr March had responded: he wanted to convince me that his father had accepted the position without distress. In fact, Mr March’s behaviour seemed to have been odd in the extreme.
His first reply was: ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’ This was said in a flat, dejected tone, so Charles admitted: but at once Mr March began to grumble, almost as though he were parodying himself: ‘You ought to have chosen a more suitable time to tell me. You might have known that hearing this would put me out of step for the day.’ Then he added again: ‘In any case, I don’t believe a word of it.’
For several days he refused to discuss the matter. He seemed to be pretending that he had forgotten it. At the same time, he kept asking with concern about his son’s health and spirits; one day at lunch, without any preamble, he offered Charles a handsome increase of his allowance to pay for a holiday.
Mr March still went about the house as though he had not so much as heard Charles’ intention. It was not until the next full family dinner party that he had to face it.
Each Friday night, when they were in London, Mr March and his brothers took it in turn to give a dinner party to the entire family: the entire family in its widest sense, their wives, their sisters and their sisters’ husbands, the children of them all, remoter relations. When I first knew the Marches, it was rare for a ‘Friday night’ to be attended by less than thirty, and fifty had been reached at least once since 1918.
The tradition of these parties went back continuously to the eighteenth century; for the past hundred years they had been held according to the same pattern, every week from September to the end of the London season.
As luck would have it, I was invited for that night. As a rule, friends of the family were asked only if they were staying in the house; it was by a slight extension of the principle that Mr March invited me.
Getliffe’s brother Francis, whose friendship with Charles began in their undergraduate days, had been living at Bryanston Square for the week. When I arrived there for tea on the Thursday, the drawing-room was empty. It was Francis who was the first to join me. He came in with long, plunging, masterful strides, strides too long for a shortish man. His face was clearly drawn, fastidious, quixotic, with no kind of family resemblance to Herbert’s, who was his father’s son by a first marriage. He had not a trace of Herbert’s clowning tricky matiness. Indeed, that afternoon he was nervous in the Marches’ house, though he often stayed there.
He disliked being diffident; he had trained himself into a commanding impatient manner; and yet most people at that time felt him to be delicate underneath. He was two years older than Charles; he was a scientist, and the year before had been elected a fellow of their college.
‘Will you dine with me tomorrow, Lewis?’ he asked. ‘They’ve got their usual party on here, and it’d be less trouble if I got out of the way.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Good work,’ said Francis. Then he asked, a little awkwardly, how I was getting on with his brother.
‘He’s very stimulating,’ I said.
‘I can believe that,’ said Francis. ‘But has he put you in the way of any briefs?’
‘No,’ I said.
Francis cursed, and flushed under his dark sunburnt skin. He was both a scrupulous and a kind-hearted man.
Just then Charles and Katherine came in. As we began tea, Francis said, with an exaggerated casualness: ‘By the way, I’ve arranged to dine out with Lewis tomorrow night. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? It’ll give you more room for the party.’
Katherine’s face was open in disappointment.
‘I hoped you would come,’ she said.
‘I should be in the way,’ said Francis. ‘It will definitely be much better if I disappear.’
Katherine recovered herself, and said:
‘You are more or less expected to come, you know. Mr L will say “If I am obliged to have the fellow residing in my house, I can’t send him away while we make beasts of ourselves.” He’ll certainly expect you to come.’
‘I don’t think I should do you credit,’ he said.
‘You’ll find points of interest, I promise you,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t know many of them, you see—’
‘Look here,’ said Katherine, ‘do you want another Gentile to keep you company? I’m certain Lewis will oblige, won’t you?’
She turned to me: as I heard that gibe of hers, I felt how fond she was of him.
Since Charles had spoken to me about Jewishness, so had she. It was no longer a forbidden subject. ‘It was a bit hard,’ Katherine had said, ‘to be stopped riding one’s scooter in the Park on Saturday because it was the Sabbath, and then on Sunday too. It seemed to me monstrously unjust.’ She had gone on: ‘But the point was, you were being treated differently from everyone else. You wouldn’t have minded anything but that. As it was, you kept thinking about every single case.’ Less proud than Charles, she had talked about her moments of shame: but she was still vulnerable. It was not till she teased Francis about being a Gentile that I heard her speak equably, as though it did not matter any more.