The Rich Are Different (102 page)

But in the autumn Germany and Italy swung into the Rome-Berlin axis and agreed in future to hunt as a pair.

It was such a relief when the papers purged themselves of all foreign news to concentrate on the Abdication.

‘This shows the British at their worst,’ said Steve, who was having to tolerate a large amount of anti-American sentiment. ‘All this talk about divorce and the Church is just an excuse. They don’t want Mrs Simpson to get the King because she’s a foreigner.’

‘Darling, it’s much more complicated than that …’ However I did not argue long with him because I had spent many years admiring the King when he had been Prince of Wales, and although I did not care for Mrs Simpson I thought some sort of compromise should be found to accommodate them.

I was very much immersed in current events at that time because I had so little to do. Steve was totally absorbed by his work which he would willingly discuss with me whenever he had a spare moment, but I was becoming more and more uncomfortably unemployed. At first I had enjoyed my leisure. I had met all my friends for lunch, gone to matinées, tried – unsuccessfully – to understand modern art, and joined the Left Book Club. But after a while these occupations had palled. I missed the cut and thrust of the business world, and the round of trivial social activity seemed shallow. I loved seeing more of George but one cannot and should not expect intellectual stimulation from a child less than two years old no matter how adorable, entrancing and unique that child might be. The twins were at school all day. Alan was away. My servants ran the house with splendid efficiency.

I was bored to tears.

Finally after the Abdication when I felt I couldn’t face reading one more article on the ideological significance of the Spanish Civil War, I plucked up
my courage and asked Steve if I might accompany him to the office each day and begin my apprenticeship as unobtrusively as possible.

‘Well, look, honey,’ he said. ‘Give me a little more time, could you? I haven’t forgotten my promise but while the house is so new I don’t want to do anything which might disturb the clients – and you know how old-fashioned the English are.’

I left the room without a word. I could not argue with him because I knew that what he said was true and I had no wish to handicap our joint enterprise. I decided I had to wait until the house was a year old, but when the first anniversary came and Steve made the same excuse I couldn’t help saying: ‘Steve how would
you
feel if you’d been out of work for a year and your wife wouldn’t lift a finger to get you an interesting job?’

I spoke in a mild voice but he immediately lost his temper. That was when I realized how guilty he felt about my exclusion. ‘I can’t help the clients’ attitudes!’ he shouted. ‘Jesus, Dinah, I have enough trouble being a foreigner! How the hell do you think they’d react if I brought in a woman to help me run the show?’

‘Well, at least I’m not a foreigner!’ I said, trying to make a joke of it.

‘Dinah,’ he said, ‘face facts. There’d be tremendous prejudice against you, and that prejudice would rebound on me. And I’ll be honest with you. I can’t afford it. I’ve had too many setbacks lately.’

That was when I first learnt that some of his major clients had returned to Van Zale’s.

‘All the more reason why you should take on extra help,’ I said calmly.

‘You’re not even trained.’

‘I can learn.’

‘I know, but—’

‘You don’t want me there.’

‘Dinah, it’s the clients—’

‘No, Steve, it’s you.’

‘Well, honey, I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I figure it would really be better for our marriage if—’

I walked out.

I walked through the streets into St James’s Park and down Whitehall to Downing Street. I did not know why I went there except that when I saw the railings I remembered the suffragettes and thought how lucky I had always been, cushioned by Paul’s money and influence from the intractable facts of life. Pausing only to marvel at my past hypocrisy I walked back into Whitehall and found a taxi to take me home.

Steve was waiting up for me. The empty bottle of whisky was the first thing I noticed when I entered the library.

‘Dinah—’

‘Steve darling, I’m so sorry.’ I kissed him. ‘I shouldn’t have got so upset. I think I’ve been very stupid for a very long time. Of course it’s quite impossible for me to work in Milk Street, and it’s not your fault either. I think when we originally agreed to go into it together we weren’t being at all realistic.’

He was
stunned by my concessions. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you there,’ he stammered. ‘I promised you and I hate to break a promise. But the clients – the situation—’

‘I understand. Don’t worry about the promise. I release you from it.’

‘But I know you must be bitterly regretting giving up your business—’

‘Never.’ I lit a cigarette with composure. ‘One must get one’s priorities right. I sold my business for several reasons, not least of which was that I was tired of it and wanted a change. I also sold it to help you outwit Cornelius who’s obviously quite one of the most dangerous men I’ve never met. My mistake was not in selling the business. I’d do that all over again if I had to. But I do think it was a mistake to think we could work together at our issuing house.’

There was a pause. At last he said awkwardly: ‘I’d really like to. If it weren’t for the clients—’

‘Let’s forget the clients, Steve.’

He reddened in an agony of embarrassment and drank some whisky. ‘Some husbands and wives can work together, I guess.’

‘Yes. But we can’t. It’s much better to face up to this, Steve, and accept it. It would be a disaster if we tried to work together.’

‘There’s no need to go into reasons!’ he said, as if terrified I intended to broadcast from the rooftops that he could not work with a wife who was cleverer than he was, but all I said was a tranquil: ‘There’s no need to go into reasons. It’s simply a fact of life.’

‘But it’s so baffling,’ he said with the naïvety which had always touched me. ‘I don’t get it. I know it’s a fact of life but I can’t understand why.’

‘Simple biology. You’ve got to feel you’re a winner. Coming second is the biggest genital-chiller known to man.’

‘But that’s not biology! That’s all in the mind!’

‘Maybe the mind of a twenty-first-century man will be different. And maybe I wouldn’t want to go to bed with him anyway. You’re the one I want to go to bed with, Steve, and you’re right here and now in 1937.’

‘But you must resent me so much—’

‘Rubbish. Oh darling, can’t you understand? As I said earlier it’s all a question of priorities. In the very beginning when I didn’t love you I didn’t want to marry you because I knew instinctively I’d never be able to cope with a situation like this. My ambition had to come before everything and the marriage would inevitably be doomed. That’s why I was always so frightened of marriage – I saw it as an infringement on my right to put my ambition first, a right which I equated with the right to survive. But I define survival differently now, Steve. I’ve at last got what I’ve always wanted, love and security, and I’m not jeopardizing that for all the issuing houses in London! Of course I shall eventually go out to work again – and the sooner the better before I go completely round the bend – but I no longer equate survival with making a million pounds. I’m not in blinkers any more. I’ve got wider horizons.’

Three-quarters of an hour later in bed he said worried: ‘But what will you do, Dinah?’

‘Do?’ I said
vaguely. ‘Oh, do. Yes, I see. I’m going to follow in my mother’s footsteps. Thank goodness that in this day and age I won’t end up in prison being forcibly fed.’

He was so astounded that he sat up in bed and switched on the light. ‘Just say that again, honey. I think I must be going crazy.’

I obligingly said it again.

‘But why? I thought you said you were so angry with your mother! I thought—’

‘Oh, it was all a misunderstanding,’ I said equably. ‘I realized that this evening. You see, I thought she was campaigning for stupid things like the right to smoke in public and drive a bus – all those sort of things that the war made possible without any help from the suffragettes. I thought her cause was a pathetic embarrassing antiquated piece of history which had no possible relevance to me. I was wrong.’ I sighed. ‘I’ve been wrong about so many things, Steve. Isn’t it amazing to think that when I first met Paul I thought I knew absolutely everything there was to know?’

‘I guess we all think that at twenty-one. About your mother—’

‘Oh yes. Well, of course she was campaigning basically against accepting cynicism and hypocrisy as a way of life. She must have been an idealist and she must have reached the stage where she felt that no further compromise with cynicism and hypocrisy was possible. So she took a stand. She stood up for what she believed in. She said: “This is wrong and must be stopped.”’ I paused, thinking of the headlines in the newspapers. ‘That’s what we’ll all have to say one day,’ I said. ‘All of us.’

He asked me how I was going to follow in my mother’s footsteps but I didn’t know. ‘One could get up on a soap-box at Hyde Park Corner and prattle about equality for women,’ I said, ‘but what good would that do? Obviously it would be better to prattle from the back benches at Westminster, but the political parties are so dreary at the moment and anyway I’m no longer sure where I stand politically. I’ll have to think about it.’

I was still thinking about it after the Coronation in May when Steve told me another important client had defected to Van Zale’s. He had his explanations ready. There had been trouble with Miller, Simon; they suffered from a fundamental ignorance about Europe which made communication difficult. The new man at the Van Zale office was a two-faced sharp-shooter who would stop at nothing to get the clients to return to Six Milk Street. The defecting client was just a stuffy Englishman who wanted to play safe by returning to a long-established house. The market was difficult, Germany was a menace … The explanations went on and on.

The truth, which I had suspected at the masquerade ball, was that Steve’s personality was fundamentally alien to the English. When he had been representing an established house with the whole weight of the Van Zale reputation behind him this defect had not mattered, but now he was on his own he stood out in the Lombard Street community like a Samurai at Sandhurst. He was too flamboyant to appeal to the financial men of the
City with their shadowed faces, quiet demeanour and rigid codes of conduct. Steve might have been successful in his profession but the feeling lingered that he was not a gentleman and even six months after the débâcle of the Abdication any American was automatically viewed with suspicion.

How far Steve was aware that he had been judged by the English and found wanting I had no idea. He was such a curious mixture of the shrewd and the naïve that it was hard to guess how sensitive he was to the feelings which lurked behind his defecting clients’ polite façades. He must have known something was wrong yet he might easily have refused to believe his personality was responsible for his troubles, and I had no intention of impairing his already shaky self-confidence by pointing out a few home truths. Besides, this would have been pointless. One cannot expect a man to alter his entire personality to suit his clients, and so Steve and I went on, he making excuses and I listening to them without argument, until I gradually realized he was drinking far, far too much.

He had always been a heavy drinker. I had accepted that and made no effort to change him, but I was conscious as middle age overtook him that the ravages of alcohol were finally taking their toll on his appearance. He had a splendid physique and superb health but now he was fifty years old and not only looked it but often looked older. His curly hair was grey, his face heavily lined, his striking eyes often dull and bloodshot. He had put on weight too, and as I noticed this steady decline in his looks I realized that any decline in his career could hardly have struck him at a more vulnerable time in his life.

My anxiety about him increased that summer when Emily the Saint decided to bring all Steve’s American children to England to see him again. Naturally he was grateful to her because the pressures of his business made it impossible for him to leave England for a visit to America, but I became nervous when Emily announced that she had rented a house by the sea at Bognor Regis for two months. I did not seriously suppose Emily would attempt to seduce him but I was terrified she would as usual arouse all his guiltiest memories.

‘Shall I come with you to Southampton to meet the ship?’ I offered tentatively, although Emily was the very last person I wanted to meet. I felt sure she would have reduced me to despair in no time at all.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘That would be hell. I always think there’s nothing worse than a wife and an ex-wife trying to be nice to each other while the husband looks on.’

I agreed but I still hated to see him go off alone. He met the ship, installed Emily and the children in their Bognor house and staggered back to London.

‘How did it go?’ I said, hardly daring to ask.

‘Fine,’ he said, pouring himself a triple whisky. ‘The little girls were very cute and I hardly recognized Scott and Tony because they’d grown so much. They all seemed well and happy and pleased to see me so I thought I’d go back to Bognor tomorrow with the twins and George.’

‘Good. How’s Emily?’

‘Lovelier
and sweeter than ever. I wish to God she’d remarry. It makes me feel so guilty to think of her living alone, bringing up my children single-handed, and all without a single word of reproach—’

How I managed not to scream I have no idea. I clenched my fists, counted to five and said in a mild voice: ‘Steve, don’t let the children spend the whole summer at Bognor – let’s have them to stay as often as possible. It’ll be fun and since Emily has the children all the time she’ll be glad to relax by herself for a change. Why don’t you suggest it?’

To my relief he did and soon I had the chance to see my stepsons again and meet my stepdaughters. The little girls were four and six years old, both pretty and both painfully shy. They clung to their nanny and asked hourly when they could go home to ‘Mama’. Scott was seventeen, tall as Steve and handsome in a dark sultry way which was most attractive, but although Emily had improved his manners I still found him hostile. However, fortunately Tony was so charming that he made up for Scott’s shortcomings. He and Alan picked up their friendship with ease once Alan had returned from Winchester, and Steve thought that the next year Tony might cross the Atlantic on his own to spend the summer with us.