The Conscience of the Rich

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It was a summer afternoon, the last day of the Bar final examinations. The doors had just swung open; I walked to my place as fast as I could without breaking into a run. For an instant I was touched again by the odour of the old Hall, blended from wooden panels, floor polish, and the after-smell of food; it was as musty as a boarding house, and yet the smell, during those days, became as powerful in making one’s heart lift up and sink as that of the sea itself.

As I stared at the question-paper, I went through an initial moment in which the words, even the rubric ‘Candidates are required to answer…’ appeared glaring but utterly unfamiliar. At the beginning of each examination I was possessed in this way: as though by a magnified version of one of those amnesias in which a single word — for example TAKE — looks as though we have never seen it before, and in which we have to reassure ourselves, staring at the word, that it occurs in the language and that we have used it, spelt exactly in that fashion, every day of our lives.

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