‘It’s a bit hard on him,’ said Francis. He broke into a smile that, all of a sudden, narrowed his eyes, creased his cheeks, and made his whole expression warm: ‘I’d better tell you, I’m feeling very shy.’
Charles broke in: ‘It’ll be slightly bizarre, but you must come. Even if it’s only to oblige Lewis. I’m sure he can’t resist the temptation. Incidentally, even if it weren’t so tempting, he wouldn’t be able to refuse it.’ Charles went on: ‘Lewis is temperamentally incapable of refusing any invitation, whether he wants to go or not. Isn’t that true?’
Katherine asked Mr March as soon as he entered the house. He came into the room and invited us both. I knew he felt it irregular; he did not want either of us at a family party; but his natural warmth prevailed. ‘Eight o’clock sharp,’ he said. ‘And you must both dress suitably for once. For this occasion, I can’t possibly let you off.’
I had never seen the house anything but empty before that Friday night. Cars were drawn up bonnet to stern in the square; from the hall one heard the clash of March voices; the drawing-room was full. There was already an orchestra-like effect of voices and laughs: this was the week’s exchange of family news. Every day, the Marches told each other the latest pieces of family gossip; Mr March would meet his brother Philip at the club, Philip would tell his wife, she would ring up her children; but it was on Friday night that the stories were crystallized, argued over, and finally passed into the common stock.
Several of the characters in Mr March’s sagas were that night present in the flesh. Sir Philip, a spare man, the furrows of whose face seemed engraved not by anxiety but by a stiff, caustic humour — he took for granted his position as head of the family and here, in his brother’s house, he walked round the entire company, giving everyone a handshake and a switched-on truculent smile. Mr March’s favourite sister Caroline, and her husband Lionel Hart, a brother of Charles’ former master. Their son Robert, who, despite Mr March’s pessimistic forecasts, had been for years successfully practising in company law. Florence Simon, the cousin who ‘thought she wouldn’t like it till she tried’. A large family of Herbert Marches, the children of the youngest brother. Mr March’s eldest daughter Evelyn, plump and pleasant-looking in a different fashion from Katherine, much darker and brown-eyed. She had married the editor of a Jewish paper, who was not present. Charles and Katherine said she was happy, but Mr March sometimes referred to her marriage with gloom.
There were many unusual faces. Three or four looked, in the stereotyped sense, Jewish. Some of the older women were enormous. Both in face and figure, the party seemed the most unstandardized one could imagine. Beauty, grotesque oddity, gigantic fatness — the family went to all extremes. There was scarcely anyone there whom, for one reason or another, one would not look at twice.
Unfortunately for me, Mr March’s eldest sister, Hannah, was not there. I wanted to see her, as she entered his narrative as a symbol of disapproval and the self-appointed leader of all oppositions. There was a legend of Mr March, on his way to his honeymoon at Mentone, putting his head out of the window at Saint Raphael and sniffing the air: then he turned to his bride and said: ‘The air is quite different here. Hannah would say it isn’t, but it is.’
The dining-room was no more clearly lit than usual when we went in; the table had been lengthened to contain the party. Mr March placed Philip on his left hand, and Philip’s wife on his right: then the brothers and sisters in order of seniority: Charles at the far end of the table, and the younger people near him. I sat a place or two from Charles between Florence Simon and one of the Herbert March girls.
Voices rose and blared as, looking down the table, I saw faces coming out of the shadows: I felt a glow because these Friday nights had gone on for so long. It was the warm romantic glow, the feeling of past time: the glow which made one of those dead and gone Friday nights become more enchanted in our minds than it ever was to sit through. I felt exactly as I sometimes did at dinner at the Inn, or when I was Francis’ guest at his High Table. The chain of lives — odd glimmers ran through my head, the fragments of information which had come down about the first English Marches sitting round their dinner-table in the City, just over their bank. The two original March families dined together on the Friday in the week they arrived in London from Deventer.
How they had first got established in Holland, where they had come from before that, there was no record nor any tradition — not even of how they derived their name. In Spain March could have been a Jewish name, but there was no evidence that these Marches ever lived there. The first mention of them in the archives was mid-seventeenth-century: they were already in Holland, already one of the leading families of the Ashkenazim (the Northern group of Jews, as opposed to the Sephardim who lived in Spain and round the Mediterranean coasts).
They were well-off when they left Deventer. During the last half of the eighteenth century, Friday night by Friday night, these parties went on, families walking to each other’s houses across the narrow City streets; their friends and relatives, the family of Levi Barend Cohen, the Rothschilds, the Montefiores, lived close by.
The nineteenth century came in; all those families, like those of the Gentile bankers, moved westward; and the Marches’ dinners took place now round Holborn. It was already the fourth generation since Deventer; the children were no longer given Jewish first names. A honeymoon couple travelled in post-chaises along the French roads as soon as the war was over, and Charlotte March wrote in 1816: ‘it must be admitted that in the arts of the toilette and the cuisine France excels our country: but we can hearten ourselves as English people that in everything essential we are infinitely superior to a country which shows so many profligacies that it is charitable to attribute them to their infamous revolution.’ This though they stayed with their Rothschild uncle in Paris; that pair thought of themselves as English, differing as little from their acquaintances as the Roman Catholic families who, when Charlotte wrote, were still hoping to be emancipated.
Victoria’s reign began. Round the dinner-table, the Marches were sometimes indignant at Jewish disabilities; David Salomons was not allowed to take his seat in Parliament. There was also talk, even in the forties, of liberalizing themselves; one March became a Christian. Apart from him, no March had married ‘out of the faith’: nor indeed out of their own circle of Anglo-Jewish families. That was still true down to the people round this table; except for one defection, by a woman cousin of Mr March’s, thirty years before.
The March bank flourished; many of the families moved to the neighbourhood of Bryanston Square; by the seventies, one of Mr March’s uncles was holding Friday dinners at No. 17. The universities and Parliament became open, and Mr March’s father went into the House. England was the least anti-Semitic of countries; when the news of the pogroms arrived from Russia in 1880, the Lord Mayor opened a fund for Jewish relief. Half the University of Oxford signed a protest. The outrages seemed an anachronistic horror to decent prosperous Englishmen. The Marches sent thousands of pounds to the Lord Mayor’s fund. Yet that news was only a quiver, a remote quiver, in the distant world.
By then the Marches had reached their full prosperity; on Friday nights cabs made their way under the gaslight to the great town houses. The Marches were secure, they were part of the country, they lived almost exactly the lives of other wealthy men.
The century passed out: its last twenty years, and the next fourteen, were the best time for wealthy men to be alive. The Marches developed as prodigally as the other rich.