The Rich Are Different (18 page)

The next morning I said to her: ‘I want to spend the rest of my stay in England at Mallingham. I’m going to turn Milk Street over lock, stock and barrel to Hal Beecher, cut myself off from society and take the long vacation I’ve been promising myself for years. Can you put up with me till the end of September?’

‘Monster!’ said Dinah, hugging me. ‘And to think only yesterday I was wondering how I put up with you at all!’

‘I suppose I should offer to take you on a grand tour of Greece and Italy, but—’

‘Quite unnecessary,’ said Dinah happily. ‘I’d much rather stay at Mallingham and build my nest. Anyway the political situation in Greece looks awful. If the British army is going to fight the Turks there I for one want to be as far from Greece as possible.’

So it was settled. I instructed O’Reilly to get rid of the Curzon Street house, pay off Miss Phelps and sell the Rolls-Royce; I decided to keep the Lanchester Forty. Then after a final meeting with Hal at Milk Street I abandoned him to his fate and cabled New York to let them know I was going on vacation. I even sent a separate cable to Steve Sullivan to say no one was to communicate with me on any business matter unless there was a disaster equal to the financial panic of 1907.

After that all I had to do was write to my wife.

I tore up six drafts before I wrote: ‘My dearest Sylvia: I have taken this sudden decision to have a long vacation in England because I believe it will ultimately be the best for both of us. I apologize in advance for the embarrassment my continuing absence will undoubtedly cause you, but must ask you to trust me to do what is right. I miss you and think of you often, but this vacation is something I have to do. All my love, PAUL.’

I paused, fidgeting with my pen, and then added: ‘P.S. If anyone should ask you if I have permanently emigrated to England you can tell them I have given you my word that I shall return.’

I looked
down at my promise, resplendent in black and white. For one long moment I hesitated, but I slipped the folded paper into an envelope, sealed the flap and sent the letter on its way across the ocean.

[2]

I remember the strong cool sunshine of an English August, and the fine soft English rain which cloaked the Broads in mist. I remember the light of long evenings and the windmill sails turning slowly against huge golden skies and the brown dots of cattle grazing on the windswept farmland. I remember the miles of lonely sandhills and the oak woods bleached by salt floods and the lost ancient churches drowsing in a wild forgotten landscape. I remember that summer of all summers, the parting of still waters beneath the prow of our yacht, the cry of the redshank, the boom of the bittern, the flash of trout in bright waters, the gleam of wild goose and the thunder of wild fowl on the wing. I remember rising at dawn and seeing the light changing on the dark meres and secret waterways, watching the movements of the bulrushes and reed-mace, the swaying of the marsh grasses as the birds began to stir. And at night the mists would swirl up from the marshes and drift through the dykes and Dinah would talk of the eynds, the water-ghosts of the far-off days when the mystery of that land had been unpenetrated for centuries by the outside world.

I remember the jostling crowds at Wroxham and Horning, the roar of the motor-boats, the screams of the raucous vacationers, the soiled waters, the litter in the reeds. I remember going under the low bridge at Potter Heigham and having half the village yelling navigational advice. And I remember sailing through the throngs of small boats up Breydon Water to the modern sprawl of a town which had once been a quiet fishing village, Great Yarmouth by the sea.

But best of all I remember escaping from those parts of Broadland which the twentieth century had discovered. I remember the hidden private broads like Mallingham far from the blare of the phonographs and the offensive young flappers and lounge-lizards in their London clothes. I remember all the isolated splendour of the Brograve Level, and I remember the gleaming fastnesses of reed and swamp, the timelessness of undiscovered villages and the walled magnificence of Mallingham Hall.

‘It’ll be better still in October,’ Dinah said to me. ‘The holiday crowds go back to London and Birmingham, the pleasure cruisers are moored for the winter and Broadland goes back to the marshmen again. The eel nets are set across the rivers, and the long guns for duck-shooting are taken down from their thongs on the farmhouse walls and the woodcock come down from Scandinavia and the wind starts to blow across the North Sea … Oh, and you should see the reed-beds! The golds and the reds and the rusts – it’s all so beautiful, so unmarked, so unspoilt, and when the wind starts to blow the cattle gallop in exultation and the wild geese fly in from the coast at dusk and all the while the eels are running to the sea …’

I stayed
on into October.

At the beginning of August I had bought a twenty-two-foot yacht. It had a plain little cabin where we could sleep, cook and eat, and for the remainder of that magic summer we divided our time between relaxing at Mallingham and embarking on long unhurried expeditions by water to comb the broads from end to end. Peterson worried about my safety and wanted with admirable loyalty but total lack of romantic imagination to follow us in a motor-boat, but I refused to allow it. Dinah and I spent our voyages alone together and lived with a simplicity I had forgotten could exist, while my employees were left to vegetate at Mallingham Hall. I knew they were all miserable, but it was so impossible for me to share their home-sickness for the city lights that I found it hard to sympathize with them. My valet Dawson tried to conceal his boredom as he tended my clothes with scrupulous care. Peterson read every novel Edgar Wallace had ever written and O’Reilly, whose sole tasks were to telephone Milk Street once a day from Norwich and buy anything that I might require, amused himself by re-reading the plays of Ibsen. Despite his Irish name O’Reilly was half-Swedish and had long been drawn to Nordic literature.

Naturally all of them thought I was eccentric but theirs, as Tennyson wrote of the Light Brigade, was not to reason why. I was indulgent with them, but although they were polite in return I occasionally caught their looks of despair whenever they thought my back was turned.

I finally gave Dinah not only the Mallingham Hours (recently purchased at the inevitable sale) but also the volume of Tennyson which I had bought her as a farewell gift. However, since I had again cancelled my passage to New York I was able to enjoy the task of selecting a dedication for the fly-leaf. At first I thought I would quote a couple of romantic lines from ‘Oenone’ but then I remembered I had decided to buy her the book after we had discussed the idealism of ‘The Revenge’. Finding the poem I read again about the heroism of Sir Richard Grenville who with his little English ship
The Revenge
had fought fifty-three Spanish galleons single-handed, and by the time I reached Sir Richard’s final exhortation to his men I was awash with all the emotions which the War had made so unfashionable.

Seizing my pen I found the lines which seemed to mark the highwater-mark of the poem’s romantic idealism and copied the words which Tennyson had put in Sir Richard’s mouth.

I sighed with nostalgic pleasure, and having completed the couplet I wrote underneath: ‘From a realist who aspires to be a romantic to a romantic who aspires to be a realist – or should it be vice versa? In profoundly grateful memory of the summer of ’22. Paul.’

‘Dreadful Victorian sentimentality!’ said Dinah with a shudder, but refused to be parted from the book. She even took it to bed with her and
would read the most flesh-crawling episodes of ‘Maud’ aloud to me by candlelight. ‘Tennyson will always remind me of you,’ she said when I managed to wrest the book from her hands.

I knew it upset her that I could never bring myself to refer to the child so I made a special effort and said with a smile: ‘I give you full permission to call our daughter after Tennyson’s most enigmatic
femme fatale
!’

‘Maud?’

‘Who else?’

‘Supposing it’s a boy?’

But I dared not think of that. The only way I could face thinking about the child was to imagine it as a little replica of Vicky, pink and white, flawlessly healthy.

‘Paul, if it’s a boy I want to call him Alan – after the first recorded owner of Mallingham, William the Conqueror’s henchman, Alan of Richmond. Do you approve?’

I nodded. It was too hard to speak. Presently she herself changed the subject and I was able to close my mind against the memory of Vicky’s infant brother suffering long ago in that second apartment I had shared with Dolly.

The days drifted past. Sometimes I thought they would go on drifting by indefinitely, but at last in early November we came back from a day’s duck-shooting to find our world had been invaded and our peace destroyed.

We had moored the punt and left old Tom Stokeby the marshman to tend to the ducks and guns. It was a grey day and the wind was blowing across the marshes from the sea. We were halfway across the lawn to the house when Dinah glanced up on to the terrace and stopped dead.

I stopped too and following her glance I saw that O’Reilly had stepped out to meet us.

Directly behind him was my partner in London, Hal Beecher, and at once I saw the end of my cherished furrow in time. Taking Dinah’s hand in mine I walked on with her up to the terrace.

‘Paul, do forgive me for intruding like this … Good afternoon, Miss Slade.’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Beecher,’ said Dinah.

I said nothing. We all went inside.

Dinah said in a rush: ‘Perhaps some tea … I’ll go and talk to Mrs Oakes.’

O’Reilly and Hal had a race to see who could open the door for her. Hal won. The door opened and closed. Dinah’s footsteps retreated into the distance, and suddenly the stench of New York was so strong that I wanted to run after her.

‘Yes?’ I said politely to Hal.

There was an awkward pause before Hal said in a low voice: ‘It’s Stewart and Greg Da Costa. I’m afraid Jay’s boys are after your blood, Paul,’ and as I held out my hand without a word he gave me the cable which had arrived that morning from my partner Steven Sullivan in New York.

[3]

‘We’ll make
you pay,’ young Gregory Da Costa had said to me at his father’s funeral earlier that year.

I had not wanted to go to the funeral but I had had no choice. It would have looked suspicious if I had stayed away, but no murderer could have felt more haunted by his crime than I had felt when I had stepped into the church that afternoon, and no retribution could have been more terrible to me than the spectre of my shattered health. It was odd to think that Jay’s death had taken me completely by surprise. It had made me realize how imperfectly I had known him. My one persistent thought throughout the funeral had been how greatly upset Vicky would have been if she had lived, but if Vicky had lived I would never have meddled in the affairs of Mr Roberto Salzedo of the Mortgage Bank of the Andes.

It was after Vicky’s death that Sylvia and I had spent two years in Europe. I had felt unable to work alongside Jay any longer, and the War gave me the necessary excuse to take over the firm’s affairs in London. Capital was badly needed in England and our House was heavily involved in War Loans.

I returned to America in 1919.

He had remarried by that time, of course – another young girl like Vicky, but not so pretty. He was cordial to me and I was cordial to him, but I found it hard to estimate the thoughts which were passing through his head and I doubt if he had any idea of the kind of thoughts which were passing through mine.

I was infinitely patient because I knew I could afford no mistakes. One cannot move against a man like Jason Da Costa without risking one’s neck, and I did not want to erect the scaffold only to find the noose slipping over my own head.

It took me another two years to assemble my materials for the scaffold, but in 1921 I at last had the chance to start building it. Huge selling syndicates were then the fashion in investment banking, and the pace of business had increased to such an extent that large flotations would sometimes be launched and disposed of within twenty-four hours. The burden on the members of the originating syndicate was therefore much heavier, for since there was no time for the selling syndicate to inquire into the calibre of the flotation, they had to trust that the originating syndicate had made the proper investigations and that the securities offered for distribution were a sound investment. Naturally all the front-rank houses could be expected to conduct proper investigations into their clients’ affairs, but mistakes were inevitably made and in such cases the selling syndicates stood to lose face with their customers; no one likes to be confronted with an irate customer who has lost his money.

However, there was little the selling syndicates could do to protect themselves. If they refused to be included in the next syndicate, the originating house would not offer them syndicate participation again and business would be lost. As a rule they chose to participate, but as their world became
increasingly dangerous, so correspondingly did it become more vital for the investment banking houses which formed the originating syndicates to be of unimpeachable integrity. An investment banker had always lived by his reputation, but now more than ever before we found that too many errors or the merest whiff of fraud could finish a banker overnight.

In 1921 Da Costa, Van Zale and Company were principally engaged in pumping capital into Europe, but we also maintained some profitable South American business, and that spring I had a visit from Mr Roberto Salzedo, a client I had helped twice before and was willing to help a third time if the circumstances merited it. Salzedo was one of those men who are so cosmopolitan that one never thinks of them as having any nationality at all; it came as a great surprise to me when I later discovered he was a secret but rabid nationalist of the hilly little republic where he had been born. He had been brought up in Argentina in a German section of Buenos Aires, had been educated expensively in Switzerland and had spent the past ten years living in New York in between frequent business sorties to South America. He looked vaguely Scandinavian and spoke excellent American English with an unidentifiable foreign accent. In any event he was an able man with considerable experience in international banking, and in those days when American banks were panting to jump on the bandwagon of foreign expansion, particularly in South America, men like Salzedo were highly prized by their employers.