On my side, I was often fascinated by the sheer machinery of their lives. They were the first rich family I had known; in those first months, it was their wealth that took my attention more, not their Jewishness. It was the signs of wealth that I kept absorbing — yes, with a kind of romantic inflation, as though I had been one of Balzac’s young men.
I should have done the same if they had not been Jews at all; yet I had already seen the meaning which being Jews had for both Charles and Katherine. They had not spoken of it. I dared not hurt them by saying a word. I could not forget Charles’ invitation to ‘see the inside of a Jewish family’ nor Katherine’s face as they quarrelled about the dance. This silence, which got in the way of our intimacy, had the minor result of misleading me. I did not appreciate for a long time how eminent the family was. I picked up some facts, that Mr March’s brother Philip was the second baronet, that both Philip and his father had sat as Conservative members: but no one mentioned, or let me infer, that the Marches were one of the greatest of Anglo-Jewish houses.
About their luxuries, however, they were as amused as I was. They were both quick at seeing their everyday actions through fresh eyes.
Katherine said one night as she came down to dinner: ‘I thought of you in my bath, Lewis. I just remembered that I’ve never run one single bath for myself in the whole of my life.’
One afternoon at Bryanston Square, I made another discovery. Charles and I were alone in the drawing-room. There came a tap on the door, and a small elderly man entered the room, wearing a cloth cap. I thought he could scarcely be a servant: Charles took no notice, and went on talking. The man walked up to the clock over the fireplace, opened it, wound it up, and went away.
‘Whoever is that?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Charles, ‘that’s the clock man.’
Charles looked surprised, then began to smile as I asked more questions. The clock man had no other connection with the house; he was appointed to come in on one afternoon a week, and wind up and supervise all the clocks. He was engaged on the same terms by other houses in the square; like many of the Marches’ servants, he would be recommended from one relative to another — their butlers and chief parlourmaids usually began as junior servants in another March household. Charles claimed to have heard one of his aunts ask: ‘I wonder if you can tell me of a good reliable clock man?’
It seemed bizarre, more so than any of the open signs of wealth. As Charles said: ‘I suppose it is the sort of thing anyone would expect Mr L to do himself. Putting on his deerstalker hat for the purpose.’
But there was one sign of wealth that neither Charles nor I could face so easily.
Our year as pupils ended in September; at the end of it, Charles remained in Hart’s chambers, scarcely mentioning the fact; Getliffe let me stay on in his ‘paying a nominal rent. Just as a matter of principle’. He had not referred again to any remission of pupil’s fees; he promised to find me some work, and several times I heard the phrase ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’.
In fact, I was doing the same work that winter as when I was still a pupil. I told myself that nothing worth having could possibly come yet. Just as I had done the year before, I attended many cases, as though it were better to be in court as a spectator than not at all. Charles, just as he had done the year before, came with me to hear Getliffe in the King’s Bench Courts. One day, it was all according to the usual pattern. Getliffe for once was not late, but he was no less flurried-looking. His wig was grimy, and he pushed it askew. As usual, when he spoke he gave the impression of being both nervous and at home. He used short and breathless sentences and occasionally broke into his impudent shame-faced smile. The case was merely a matter of disentangling some intricate precedent and he was doing it clumsily and at length. Yet the judge was kind to him, most people were on his side.
When they went in to lunch, Charles and I walked in the Temple gardens, just as we had often done the year before.
‘One thing about him,’ said Charles, ‘he does enjoy what he’s doing. Don’t you agree? He thoroughly enjoys coming into court and wearing his wig. Even though he’s a bit nervous. Of course he enjoys being a bit nervous. He’s completely happy playing at being a lawyer.’
Then he smiled, and his eyes shone.
‘But still, I refuse to let him take me in altogether. It will be monstrous if he wins this case. It will be absolutely monstrous.’
Charles began to argue, at his most incisive, what Getliffe’s case should have been. He could not forget what he called the ‘muddiness’ of Getliffe’s mind: even though he felt humorously tender to him as he heard him speak, even though he could not escape the envy that a carefree spontaneous nature evokes in one more constrained.
‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind putting up a bit of muddiness myself — if I could get a foot in first.’
Charles was intent on the pure argument; for him, usually so quick, it took moments to realize that I had spoken bitterly. We were further apart than usual; here, more than anywhere, each felt estranged from the other; as our careers came nearer, we began to know for the first time that we were being driven different ways. Then he said: ‘I suppose you feel that you’re wasting months of your life.’
‘Don’t you? Don’t you?’
‘I might waste more than months.’ He paused, and went on: ‘Don’t you think that even Getliffe sometimes wonders whether he’s been such a success after all?’
‘I’d prefer it to none at all.’
‘That’s over-simple,’ said Charles. ‘Or else I’m making excuses in advance. Do you mean that?’
‘How much are you looking forward to your first case?’ I said.
‘Not very much,’ said Charles. ‘Not in your fashion. I don’t know. I may be glad when it comes.’
Within a month of that conversation, his first case came. Something different, that is, from the guinea visits to the police courts, which we had both made: instead, a breach of contract, legally interesting although the amounts involved were small, arrived in Hart’s chambers. The plaintiff knew one of Charles’ uncles, and Hart himself; Hart, who had married Charles’ cousin, suggested that young March was the most brilliant of the family and only needed some encouragement. So the case came to Charles. There was nothing sensational about it; it was a chance for which, that winter, I would have given an ear.
Charles could see the depth, the rancour, of my envy. One of the nights we studied the papers together, he looked at me with eyes dark and hard.
‘I’m just realizing how true it is,’ he said, ‘that it’s not so easy to forgive someone, when you’re taking a monstrously unfair advantage over him.’ Trying to compensate for my envy, I spent evenings with him over the case. He was so restless, so anxious, that it was uncomfortable to be near: to begin with, I envied him even that. To have a real event to be anxious about! Then I suspected that this was not just ordinary anxiety.