The Rich Are Different (68 page)

‘Dinah?’ I stooped to kiss her cheek. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No, I’m horribly hung-over. I hate myself when I drink too much.’

‘Hell, I wasn’t so sober myself! But we had fun,’ I said softly between kisses, ‘didn’t we?’

She looked
past me to the house. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We had fun.’ Suddenly she smiled and pulled me down beside her on the seat. Five minutes later when we’d forgotten our hang-overs she removed her mouth from mine long enough to say: ‘Let’s have some breakfast,’ and after another five minutes we levered ourselves to our feet.

In the dining-room we drank a pot of weak coffee but she left all the scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages and toast to me. There were kidneys too under the lid of another silver chafing dish, but I left those well alone. Much as I wanted to blend with the English I drew the line at sharing their taste for offal, and besides a kidney isn’t what you want to see first thing in the morning after an evening’s heavy drinking.

‘Alan should be down soon,’ said Dinah after telling the maid to bring another pot of coffee. ‘He usually wakes up at about this time.’

I wanted to ask several questions about Alan but wasn’t sure how to do it without raising Paul’s ghost. In the end I asked safe neutral questions about his school and she told me he loved his lessons and had plenty of friends. We talked a little longer. Even allowing for maternal exaggeration I wondered if the picture she painted of this happy little kid without a care in the world was quite as accurate as she wanted it to be.

In the end I had to ask. I couldn’t help myself. ‘He’s all right, is he?’ I said.

Some terrible memory burnt briefly in her eyes and vanished. ‘Perfect,’ she said coolly, and added as the maid re-entered the room: ‘More coffee?’

Now we were up to our necks in memories of Paul I thought I might as well go on. ‘Do you ever talk to him about Paul?’ I said when my cup was full of coffee again.

‘A bit. Not much. I find it terribly difficult. Anyway Alan never seems to want to know anything about him.’

‘Maybe he sees how upset you get and doesn’t dare ask. No, forget I said that. It’s none of my business … Are you going to take him back to America one day?’

She looked genuinely surprised, as if I had made an extraordinary suggestion. ‘What for?’ she said. ‘It’s not as if he has any affectionate American relations who would make him feel welcome.’

‘Don’t you want to show him his father’s palace at One Willow Street?’

An odd expression came into her eyes. Paul was right there in the room with us now. I could almost see him reaching for an unbuttered slice of toast after pushing away the weak coffee with a shudder.

At last she said, ‘Cornelius will never share that bank with Alan.’

‘Honey,’ I said, ‘it’s not Cornelius’ bank.’

A couple of uneventful seconds trickled away. A bird perched on the sill and sang his heart out. Beyond him the drizzle had stopped and the sun was starting to shine.

‘Well, of course,’ she said slowly, ‘it
would
be nice to know there’d be no obstacles placed in Alan’s way in the unlikely event of him wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps.’

‘All he’d
ever have to do is cross the Atlantic and knock on my door.’

‘And Cornelius?’ she persisted.

‘Oh, he won’t be around at Willow and Wall by that time. He’ll be backing talkies or investing in aeroplanes, and banking’ll be no more than a distant memory.’

She was fascinated. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Why do you think I’m in Europe? I’m going to build up a base of power so broad that in five years’ time I’ll be able to reach across the Atlantic and tip him out of the nest. I’ve got it all mapped out.’

‘My God!’ she said. ‘You do hate him, don’t you! What’s been going on?’

‘I’ll tell you the whole story,’ I said, but didn’t. I just said Cornelius was throwing his weight around by threatening to withdraw his capital from the firm unless he got what he wanted. ‘The money’s gone straight to his head,’ I explained. ‘He’s a power-crazy punk who’s got too big for his little boy’s sneakers. He acts not only as if all the world’s for sale but as if he ought to get a fifty per cent discount. He’s—’

‘He’s the Villain of the Piece!’ she laughed, relaxing suddenly. Her eyes were sparkling, her hang-over forgotten. It was good to see her in such high spirits again. ‘I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for him! Isn’t there really anyone in the world who thinks he’s sweet and adorable?’

‘Well, there’s his mother and sister. I guess they think he’s cute. And there’s Sylvia—’ I saw her face and broke off. I knew it was time to kick Paul out of the room. ‘What are we going to do this morning?’ I demanded abruptly, rising to my feet. ‘Can we go sailing again?’

We went sailing and took Alan with us. It was a great morning and afterwards at the Hall we had the traditional English Sunday lunch, overcooked roast beef sliced wafer thin, rock-hard roast potatoes and a slab of pulpy Yorkshire pudding. I must have been crazy with hunger because I ate everything in sight, and after the treacle tart I sagged in my chair like a sack of gravel.

Alan and his nurse went down to the village to see a friend.

‘Time to exercise!’ said Dinah ruthlessly and suggested a brisk walk but this time I overruled her and the only brisk walk we took was straight upstairs to her bedroom.

It wasn’t until Alan was in bed that she got me talking about the bank again. I didn’t intend to talk about my work. Investment banking isn’t the most fascinating subject for a woman and even Caroline, who took such a strong vicarious interest in my career, would yawn whenever I talked of the thrills of a giant merger. But Dinah started talking about Hal Beecher, whom she knew well, and one thing led to another until before I knew where I was I was telling her about the glories of Van Zale Participations. At first I thought her show of attention was no more than a gesture of politeness but then I realized she was genuinely interested in investment trusts. She was used to the business world. She read the
Financial Times
daily and had a good grasp of current economics. For the first time in my life I found I was with a woman who could not only listen intelligently when I talked
about my work but could actually turn the conversation into a stimulating discussion.

‘My God,’ I said as the truth slowly dawned on me, ‘you really do run that business, don’t you?’

She looked at me as if I’d forgotten to lace up my strait-jacket. ‘But of course I run it!’ she exclaimed. ‘What did you think? Do you imagine I’m just a puppet and Hal pulls all the strings?’

‘Of course not!’ I protested, very hot under the collar.

My discomfort must have been entertainingly obvious for she laughed. ‘Why do you think Paul took an interest in me?’

‘Well, I naturally assumed … well, I mean, it was kind of obvious … you see, we all thought …’ I gave up.

‘Even if I hadn’t been his mistress I would have been his protégée. He always made that quite clear.’

‘Yeah.’ I gazed at her with new eyes, and then realizing it would be more dignified to stop gaping at her and stage a double-quick recovery I said smoothly: ‘No wonder you were so special to Paul! Say Dinah, I know it’s none of my business but while we’re on the subject of how special you were to him, what exactly did Paul say in that last letter he wrote you? I’ve always wondered.’

She gave me a puzzled look. ‘What last letter?’

We stared at one another.

‘Didn’t you get it?’ I said surprised. ‘I always assumed Mayers found the envelope lying around and put it in the mail to you, but obviously he must have destroyed it when he destroyed all the other personal letters. Paul wrote to you the night before he died, Dinah. He took the envelope with him to the office that morning. I saw it myself.’

She was greatly disturbed. ‘Did he give you any hint about what he’d said?’

‘I got the impression it was the purplest prose that ever dripped from a romantic pen.’ I paused before adding abruptly: ‘I’ll be honest with you. I told him to shelve it. He was in a bad state, not in touch with the cold hard facts of life. I didn’t think it would do anyone any good if that letter ever crawled out of the envelope into the light of day.’

There was a long, long silence. Then she said in a shaky voice: ‘Do you think he wanted to come after me to Mallingham?’

Rage shot through me. I felt angry with her for clinging to the past and furious with myself for raising the subject. Worst of all I hated Paul for staying so vividly alive long after his memory should have begun to fade.

I managed not to speak but I clenched my fists as I turned away.

‘Oh Steve,’ she said. ‘Steve.’

Her arms were around my neck. She was kissing me. ‘Don’t let’s look back,’ she whispered at last. ‘I do so hate to look back.’

Some time later I was able to say violently: ‘I’d like to make a bonfire of all those old memories and dance in the ashes!’

She laughed. She’d just fixed us drinks, and now she raised her glass to
mine. ‘To the ashes!’ she said boldly, challenging me to laugh with her, and the future swung round to face us as the door banged shut on the past.

[2]

It took me less than a month to realize I was crazy about her. Of course I wasn’t in love – my craziness did have its limits – but I liked her better than any other woman I’d ever met. What I liked best about her was that she never leant on me in any way. After all, it’s a fact of life that for a man a woman is usually a bit of a burden, and no matter how much he may care for her the chances are that she’ll be a dependent creature who looks to him for support. Even Caroline, who bawled loudly about women’s emancipation in the course of spreading the birth control gospel, was dependent on me for everything she needed and had never made any real effort to lead a less conventional life. I’d never objected to this state of affairs either. When a man’s young it makes him feel strong and masterful to have a woman dependent on him, but I wasn’t a kid any more and I no longer needed a dependent woman to prove to me how strong and masterful I was. I had reached the stage where I could appreciate a woman who could enjoy my success without devouring it like a parasite, and Dinah filled the bill. She was no millstone round my neck. She made me feel free as air. In her independence I found my own emancipation, and I wanted to tell all those husbands who kept their wives hooked up to the kitchen sink that the taste of my freedom was very, very sweet.

So that was one advantage about Dinah: she made no demands on me because she had a busy satisfying life of her own. But there were other advantages. She was mature enough to conduct an affair without any messy scenes, she was smart enough not to kid herself that I’d ever leave my wife, she was tremendous fun, and she was just as great in bed as I’d always suspected she would be. Well, how often does a man meet a woman like that? Not often, as we all know. I felt I was very lucky, and to my gratification she told me she felt she was lucky too.

‘You’re so wonderfully straightforward!’ she said admiringly. ‘No neuroses, no complexes, no problems! I can’t tell you how relaxing you are!’

I thought of Caroline, her nose in her amateur psychology handbook as she remorselessly analysed the effects of my father’s early death. My mother, whom I’d loved, had been classified as ‘too narcissistic’ to achieve a truly maternal response to her sons. My stepfather, whom I had liked enormously, had been called the ‘architect of my adolescent instability’ by his friendly refusal to adopt a paternal attitude where one was sorely needed. I was told this absence of ‘adequate parental authority and guidance’ had contributed to my ‘anti-social tendencies’ at educational institutions, and had resulted in Luke and Matt becoming ‘unnaturally dependent’ on me. Their emotional development was labelled ‘arrested’ and my concern for my brothers’ welfare was called a ‘fixation’.

When I
really thought about it I realized I must have been a saint to have put up with this kind of drivel from my wife for so long.

Nuts to Caroline, I thought happily in my new mood of emancipation, but as time went on I found I could no longer dismiss Caroline from my mind just by saying nuts. Caroline was fast becoming my biggest headache. Scrupulously I wrote to her every week for fear that if I didn’t she might leap aboard the next ship to Europe, and equally scrupulously she answered my letters by return of post to reassure me that Luke and Matt were behaving themselves, but the peace of mind I received from these regular reports only made me realize how important it was not to quarrel with her. That I was teetering on the brink of some unplumbed marital abyss was obvious even to me, coasting along as I was on the golden crest of my new affair. Caroline might encourage me to relax occasionally with other women but I was pretty sure the boundaries of the new sexual freedom she preached would stop far short of the kind of relationship I was now enjoying with Dinah Slade.

From that deduction it was just a short step to asking myself what I was going to do when Caroline arrived in London. I analysed my position carefully. I was crazy about Dinah, but it wouldn’t last. It was true that at the moment I couldn’t see our affair ever ending but that was because I was temporarily crazy. The affair would end, I’d be left with nothing but a second divorce and limited access to my sons, and my English clients, whom I was trying so hard to cultivate, wouldn’t like it at all.

I didn’t want to make any bad mistakes.

The most sensible course I could see was to tone down my affair with Dinah to the point where I could make Caroline believe it was unimportant, and then involve Caroline so thoroughly in her new social duties that she didn’t have time to keep too sharp an eye on me. It was a tricky situation but with a little finesse I thought I could handle it.

Dinah wasn’t much interested in Caroline. She just thought that as Caroline was a complaisant wife there was no problem. The ones who interested her were my brothers.

‘Steve,’ she said one day. ‘Just how old are these two “boys” you keep referring to?’

‘Thirty-seven.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not just because I had to bring them up single-handed,’ I said, trying to explain why I felt so responsible for them. ‘It’s because I’ve always had all the luck and I feel guilty about it. I can remember my father saying to my mother that his own life would have been quite different if
his
brother had shared his luck with him. Uncle was very successful and very rich and very mean.’