The Rich Are Different (67 page)

‘Some fool discovered America!’ laughed Dinah. ‘And Eastern England found it was facing the wrong way!’ She told me how the tide of economic life had receded, how Henry VIII had wrecked the monasteries and how even the coastline had crumbled into disintegration. The people had gone away. Towns had disappeared beneath the sea. East Anglia had become a backwater again with only the great churches remaining as mementoes of its mighty past.

‘There must be a moral in that story somewhere,’ I murmured, idly picturing a pastoral scene in which a bunch of archaeologists excavated a sign which read ‘Wall Street’.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking
across the swaying reeds of Horsey Mere. ‘Nothing’s for ever. Everything changes eventually, and it’s the people who adapt who survive.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and carefully buried the butt. ‘Shall we walk to the sea? It’s not far, only a mile and a half.’

‘Fine.’ I glanced at her. The wind was blowing her dark hair and she seemed relaxed. I don’t know why I was so sure that we had both been thinking of Paul.

We walked down the quiet country road to a cluster of trees. A car passed us and once a cart came jogging by from the village but otherwise we saw no one. The only sounds were the humming of the wind and the thudding of our footsteps on the road.

‘Horsey Church is interesting,’ said Dinah. ‘It’s just down there in the woods. Would you like to see it?’

But I wanted to get to the sea. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Once you’ve seen one old church you’ve seen ’em all. Let’s keep going.’

She said nothing but this time I actually caught the faraway look in her eyes and felt Paul’s elegant hands pushing us apart. Feeling furious with myself I made a big effort to take a civilized interest in the landscape.

‘I like the stonework on those cottages over there,’ I said tentatively. ‘Would that be traditional around these parts?’

She started to talk busily about flint used as rough lumps and flint used after being dressed by flint-knappers. She talked about the technique of random flintwork with corner stones and projecting plinths finished in brick. She talked about flints faced smooth and dressed square and how to gallet the mortar joints between them. By the time she had finished I could have built a house Norfolk-style myself and even pintiled the roof with oak pins hooked over thin laths if I happened to have forgotten my reed-thatching technique. I wondered why the hell I had been invited to Mallingham. If she were still in love with Paul’s memory she would hardly have issued the invitation on account of my beautiful blue eyes.

Dunes separated us from the sea as we followed a cart-track across the last fields. It was a real scramble up those dunes. At the top I took a lungful of sea air and narrowed my eyes against the wind streaming towards us across the moody grey sea. I hadn’t expected the Caribbean so I wasn’t disappointed, but I was sorry the sand was so dark. However, I wasn’t going to say I didn’t like it and anyway I always enjoy a stretch of deserted beach so I yodelled ‘Yippee!’ with my usual verve and cascaded down the dunes.

She didn’t follow me and when I ploughed back to her I found she had collapsed in a cosy little hollow out of the wind.

‘This is a great stretch of coast!’ I said, flinging myself down beside her.

‘What a marvellous guest you are, Steve!’ she said smiling at me. ‘At least I don’t have to waste time wondering if you’re enjoying yourself.’

‘You bet I’m enjoying myself!’ I said, and took her in my arms.

We had a long kiss which turned into several kisses, each one longer than the last. Her mouth was supple and generous. I felt a warmth, then a hot surge of power.

She shifted
beneath me. ‘Steve—’ Her hands pushed against my chest. When I took no notice she clenched her fists and started to fight. ‘Let me go, let me go, let me GO!’

I muttered an obscenity, rolled away from her and crawled away into the dunes to relieve myself.

After that there was a long silence. I sat listening to the wind and the gulls until from far away I heard a succession of small jerky sounds which had to be of human origin.

‘Oh Christ!’ I muttered, crawling back on all fours through the sand-grass for a peep.

She was stretched out on her stomach, her face hidden in the crook of her arm as she bawled like a two-year-old. She couldn’t have surprised me more if she’d thrown off all her clothes and revealed a snake tattooed on her bottom.

I put my arms around her, rubbed my cheek soothingly against hers and held her till the tears dried up.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it. I can take anything except another lecture on dressed flint.’

She gulped. The mascara had smudged and her eyes were big, dark and tragic, making her look like a heroine in an old-time melodrama. All we needed to complete the atmosphere was the honky-tonk piano in the background.

‘I wanted to recapture that summer Paul and I spent together,’ she said, her voice high with grief. ‘It was the happiest summer of my life, and as the years went by afterwards I became haunted by the fear that I’d never be as happy as that again. I knew you were absolutely different from Paul, but I remembered how fond of you he was, and I – I—’

‘You thought you could be fond of me too.’

‘Yes. I know it sounds stupid, but … I’ve been so lonely, Steve. There’s been no one else since Paul died. Oh, I don’t deny I tried to replace him, but each time I tried it was disastrous and in the end I gave up trying.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ I said puzzled. ‘What went wrong? Are you saying no man ever measured up to Paul?’

‘Yes, but it was more complicated than that. The more successful I became the less men could accept me as an individual. The less I conformed to a feminine stereotype the more hostile and angry they became. I can’t blame them either because if I were a man I’d hate a woman who was more successful than I was. But on the other hand I couldn’t help hoping that there was someone somewhere who could cope.’

‘Hell, Dinah!’ I said good-naturedly. ‘All you’re bitching about is that you’re having a bit of trouble finding the right person. So what’s new about that? The right person’s never easy to find.’

‘That’s true but in my case I suspect it’s practically impossible.’ She took a deep breath, and sensing she was straining to communicate with me I wiped the smile off my face and made a serious attempt to understand what she was talking about. ‘I don’t want a man who leans on me because I’m
stronger than a lot of women,’ she said, ‘and I don’t want a man who’s stronger than me yet is so unsure of it that he can’t accept me as an individual with a life of my own. I don’t want to come home from the office and find I have to play “the little woman” all the time – and yet I certainly don’t want to come home and find I have to be one of the boys. I spend all day in a man’s world and when I come home I want to be treated as a woman – but the woman I really am, not the woman some man thinks I ought to be. I’m not a serf. I’m not a clockwork doll. And I’m certainly not a pretty face. I’m a person. Nobody expects all men to be alike. Why must society demand that all women should be identical? The situation would be amusing if it weren’t so hurtful.’

‘Are you trying to tell me in all seriousness,’ I said incredulously, ‘that any woman who’s not a dumb broad makes a man feel less masculine?’

‘Yes, I am. Paul was the exception which proved the rule.’

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘I wish you’d told me that ten minutes ago when I wanted to rape you and then maybe I wouldn’t have bust all the buttons off my fly.’

There was a split second of utter silence while our future hung in the balance and then she giggled. I smiled encouragingly. A moment later we were both laughing and the tension had vanished.

‘Let’s go back to the mill,’ I said, and as we left the dunes I took her hand and squeezed it to let her know that everything was going to be just fine.

[2]

When we arrived home it was six-thirty and Alan had finished his supper. Dinah told me to help myself to a drink while she read him his bed-time story, but I was missing my boys already and the opportunity to tell a bedtime story seemed too good to be passed up. After she had finished her chapter of
The Little Duke
I launched into the saga of Billy Joe ‘Six-Shooter’ McStarrett and was relieved to see Alan behaving like a normal six-year-old instead of like a little old man who read nothing but
Das Kapital
.

‘Tell it again!’ he begged as Dinah shuddered, and his enthusiasm set the tone for the evening. After dinner we wandered down to the pub, and although the saloon bar was about as gay as a funeral parlour I soon found my way into the public bar where all the local men were playing darts. I’d never played before but when Dinah introduced me I was at once invited to join in, and time passed very happily as I hurled my darts at the board and put away tankards of dark treacly English beer. The local men became almost sociable after I’d bought the first round. The only trouble was I couldn’t understand a word they said as their Norfolk accent was so heavy, but Dinah was a talented interpreter and told me to my amazement that they couldn’t understand me any better than I could understand them.

‘What are they saying?’ I muttered as I scored a bull’s eye by accident and bought them another round of beer.

‘They’re saying what a wonderful sport you are!’ hissed Dinah, much amused.

I knew
what a compliment
that
was. I beamed around the room with pride.

It was a shock when the pub closed just when I was getting into my sportsman’s stride, but when I thought of the treat in store for me I headed back very willingly to Mallingham.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ offered Dinah when we stepped into the hall.

‘How about a quick glass of champagne?’

‘After beer?’ She was horrified but she trotted off obediently and returned with a respectably cobwebbed bottle. ‘Your American drinking habits are unbelievably barbarous!’ she said severely. ‘Yes, I know – don’t tell me! It’s Prohibition! If you ask me Prohibition’s the best excuse a nation ever had to indulge in every imaginable excess!’

‘You bet!’ I said. ‘We call it making whoopee. Let’s go upstairs.’

‘Wait – we need glasses! Unless, of course, you intend to empty the champagne into the bath and wallow in it. Knowing you Americans, nothing would surprise me.’

‘I’ll get the glasses,’ I said, veering towards the kitchens. ‘You run the bath.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Don’t be so goddamned British!’ I prowled down the corridor and left her laughing behind me. It was so dark I wouldn’t have recognized my own grandmother if we’d met eyeball to eyeball, but after I’d realized there was no electric light I got a match alight and started poking around the kitchens. A stray candle helped. By the time I’d unearthed the glasses ten minutes had ticked away and the sound of running water had stopped.

‘Dinah?’

‘I’m waiting, Mr Sullivan!’

A soft wavering light was glowing in the grand bathroom which Alan had shown me earlier. I walked in and stopped dead.

‘Gee whiz, lady!’ I said, whistling my appreciation.

She had filled the enormous bath almost to the rim and had added some magic ingredient – fresh from the Diana Slade Cosmetics laboratories, no doubt – to create a billowing froth of bubbles. The light in the room came from a silver candelabra on top of the laundry hamper, and the flames from the five candles cast a sultry light on Dinah as she lounged, visible only from the chin upwards, in that deep old tank of a bathtub.

‘“‘Come into my parlour,’ said the spider to the fly,”’ she teased, beckoning me with her toe.

‘No fly-paper could stop me!’ I popped the cork from the bottle, filled a glass and held it just out of her reach.

‘Brute!’ she said, making a grab for the glass without success.

I held it a little further away and grinned from ear to ear.

‘I’m not moving another inch! Why should you see me stark naked when you’re fully dressed?’

‘No reason at all,’ I said cheerfully and stripped off my clothes. After I’d
shed my shorts I filled my own glass, announced: ‘To my hostess!’ and drained every drop before pouring myself a refill.

Her eyes were as big as saucers. She looked as though she’d never seen a man naked before:

‘My God,’ she said in awe. ‘You’re enormous! You look even taller without your clothes than with them!’

I roared with laughter. ‘Oh, are you only referring to my height? I’m disappointed!’

She laughed too and when I offered her the glass again she stood up. The dim light reflected sensuously on her glistening flesh. Feathery moisture clung to the soft shining curves of her body.

She took a sip of champagne and looked at me. I looked back. Then I took the glass from her, tossed it over my shoulder and scrambled into the bath to ram my body hard against hers.

[1]

When I awoke I was sprawled diagonally across the four-poster in Dinah’s room. The sheet beneath me was twisted around my left leg, the other bedclothes were strewn across the floor, and one of the pillows, which were all hanging improbably over the top of the wardrobe, had burst to ooze goose-down over the carpet. I was naked, alone and cold. Outside it appeared to be raining.

I sat up. After holding my head for a moment I staggered to the basin in the corner of the room and put my face under the cold tap. When I came up for air I heard the church bells chiming far away and remembered it was Sunday.

It was seven o’clock, time for early breakfast – or for early communion if one was a churchgoer. Back in my own room I cleaned myself up, dressed and retrieved last night’s clothes from the bathroom. I was just draping them over the back of a chair when I glanced out of the window and saw Dinah below me in the garden. She was shrouded in a shapeless raincoat and huddled on the wrought-iron seat which overlooked the Broad.

I went downstairs. The kitchens were stirring but I saw no one on my way outside to the terrace. The fresh air cleared my head. I didn’t call out to Dinah, just crossed the lawn towards her, and when I reached the seat I saw she must have been there for some time for the drizzle had soaked her hair.