The Rich Are Different (72 page)

She hung up on me. An hour later after I had emptied half a bottle of Scotch she called back.

‘I’m sorry I said those horrible things to you,’ she said, ‘but you said some horrible things to me. I wonder if you even realize how horrible they were.’

‘I not only realize it,’ I said, ‘but I’d say them all again.’ Then it was my turn to hang up.

Two hours
later when all the Scotch was gone I called her back. She was still awake, still by the phone, because she picked it up on the first ring.

‘I want to know when the twins come,’ I said. ‘Poor wretched little kids, I’m so goddamned sorry about them. I’ll take care of them if you don’t want them.’

‘You’re drunk,’ she said. ‘I’ll never give them up, never, and what’s more they’ll be entirely mine. Fathers of illegitimate children have no rights – they can’t even seek custody.’ And the line went dead.

I was indeed very drunk by that time so I cried a little and let myself pass out. It was dawn and the room was getting light.

I sailed the following afternoon. I left the guys at the bank to clean up in my wake and somehow managed to arrive at Southampton on time. The ship sailed slowly west out of sight of land and I lay in my cabin with the blinds drawn.

It was a rough crossing. I drank most of the time – too much, I knew I was drinking too much, and I knew I had to stop or I’d end up like my father. Then my father’s memory sobered me, just as it always did, and when the ship reached New York my mind was clear, my hands were steady and I felt ready to fight whatever battles came my way.

I went up on deck to look at the city. It was one of those brilliant fall mornings when the air is clear and the water very blue. The famous jagged skyline stared back at me sleazily, as harsh as the mouth of a gangster’s gun, and suddenly I longed for London, for the solid bulk of Admiralty Arch, the honkytonk glamour of Eros, the fairytale towers of Horseguards and all the other friendly landmarks of the city I’d come to call my home.

The ship docked. It was a lengthy process but by the time I walked down the gangway I was at least excited at the prospect of being reunited with my family.

In the customs hall I stopped to look around – and there waiting for me by the barrier I saw not Caroline, not my children, not even my damnfool brothers, but my enemy, Cornelius Van Zale.

1929–1933

[1]

‘“Though
the mills of God grind slowly,”’ said the sampler which stood before the fireplace in my office, ‘“they grind exceeding small. Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.”’

Longfellow’s lines had never been more appropriate. Throughout the Crash I had been besieged by people begging me to lock the sampler in the nearest closet, but I kept it exactly where it was. The lines had been embroidered by my father’s maiden sister and formed one of a set of six samplers which had hung on the parlour wall of the farm where I had been born. My mother had given me ‘The Mills of God’ as an Awful Warning after Paul died, and I had become so attached to it that I had had it mounted on a wooden stand. As my life became increasingly complex it soothed me to be reminded daily of a simple straightforward rural world.

The sampler was always the first thing I saw as I entered the room. It says much for my state of mind after the partners’ meeting late on the afternoon of October the twenty-ninth, 1929, that I never even noticed the sampler as I reeled back into the office.

Sam had our cigarettes alight before I had finished sinking into a chair.

‘What happened?’

I inhaled deeply and started to cough. I knew I had to give up smoking. I had now reached the stage of being too guilty to call a doctor whenever I had a touch of bronchitis.

‘It’s all right,’ I gasped when the worst of the wheezing was over. ‘Lewis got a twenty-eight-day extension on the loan by inviting the bank president to go yachting with him in the Bahamas this winter, Matt and Luke are unemployed, and I have a halo on my head and a pair of wings growing out of my shoulders.’

‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed Sam with admiration. ‘And Steve? Is he coming home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, now he’s really got his back to the wall! Congratulations, Neil … Say, is anything wrong?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’ But I was unable to repress a small shudder.

Although I would never have admitted it to a living soul, I was scared to death of Steven Sullivan.

[2]

Steve had
just concluded a boisterous boozy English summer by knocking up Dinah Slade. We had been following his progress with interest for some time as we tried to figure out just what the hell was going on. Whatever it was I didn’t like it. It was all very well Sam arguing that Dinah Slade was doing us a favour by taking Steve off our backs, but I couldn’t visualize Steve, who enjoyed power more than any other man I knew, ever being content for long to potter around the London office – or indeed ever forgiving and forgetting how he had come to be in Europe in the first place – and I certainly didn’t see Dinah Slade as a nice girl devoid of ulterior motives. No woman makes a habit of sleeping with bankers and bearing them illegitimate children unless she is after something much more substantial than easy credit.

‘But what can she be after?’ said Sam mystified. ‘It can’t be money because she’s got plenty of that already.’

‘I suspect she resents the fact that I inherited Paul’s fortune while her boy didn’t get a red cent.’

‘But that’s past now! There’s nothing she can do about it!’

‘Wrong, Sam. She can shack up with Steven Sullivan and take us all for the biggest ride in town.’

Sam just laughed, said I was ripe to play the title role in a Hollywood movie about Machiavelli and asked if I had ever considered the possibility that Miss Slade had merely jumped into bed with Steve because he was all hell with the women. I laughed too, but absent-mindedly. I was too busy remembering Paul saying to me long ago: ‘You and Dinah! Such ambition!’ and I thought again, as I had thought so often since that conversation, that I really did not care at all for Miss Dinah Slade.

I first heard of her in the summer of ’22 but I never knew her name because my mother could only bring herself to refer to her as That Woman. ‘Poor Sylvia had been completely abandoned,’ I heard her mutter to my stepfather. ‘Paul seems determined to stay in Europe with That Woman.’

However my great-uncle remained married to his exquisite third wife, and I had no idea that he was still in communication with That Woman until the spring of ’26 when my mother tried to tell me I could not spend a second summer at Paul’s Bar Harbor cottage.

‘Miss Slade is in New York!’ announced my mother, much as an astronomer might announce the appearance of a new comet in the heavens. I had an impression of a rare natural phenomenon trailing clouds of doom in its wake.

‘Who’s she?’ I said excited.

‘Paul’s English mistress.’ My mother’s voice sank a full octave. The implication was that whereas an American mistress would have been wholesome an English mistress represented the full decadence of twentieth-century Europe. ‘Cornelius, I cannot in all good conscience sanction your visit to Bar Harbor this year. I feel I must register some protest no matter how small against poor Sylvia’s intolerable position.’

I said
nothing but after considering the position I screwed up my courage and called Paul in New York. A week later I was on my way to Maine. My mother might criticize Paul till she was purple in the face but whenever he chose to charm her she was, like every other woman, clay in his hands.

At Bar Harbor my friend Jake Reischman said to me: ‘What do you think of Miss Dinah Slade? All society’s talking of her. Have you met your little cousin yet?’

I can remember every detail of that scene. We were lounging by the tennis court as we drank lemonade. Tennis at Bar Harbor always required unusual cunning because of the strong sea-winds, and that day the wind was gusting true to form and sending fluffy little clouds scudding across the sky. My three friends, Jake, Kevin and Sam, were watching me curiously. It was typical of Jake, who prided himself on his sophistication, to bring up a chic New York society item with the air of a man who had at least three mistresses of his own and was considering annexing a fourth. We all talked endlessly about women and without actually lying tried to convince each other we had been seducing every woman in sight since the onset of puberty.

‘What little cousin?’ I said to Jake, and that was the end of my lack of interest in Dinah Slade. That was when she began to creep into my life inch by inch as we grasped the opportunities Paul had given us and moved inexorably on, month by month, year by year, towards that inevitable future battleground when her ambition would lock horns with mine.

[3]

I saw little of Paul when I was young. My parents’ marriage was considered a mésalliance by my mother’s family, and even after my father died we did not return East but remained in Ohio both before and after my mother so promptly remarried. I was four when I left my father’s farm and went to live in Velletria, the Cincinnati suburb where my stepfather Dr Wade Blackett was the king-pin of the local hospital.

My stepfather was walking proof that not all surgeons are handsome devil-may-care fellows pursued by throngs of nubile nurses. Unremarkable in looks he had that special pedestrian manner which men acquire only when they have worked hard all their lives, prospered modestly and never taken a single risk which might have made their lives exciting. My mother had married him, as she had once confided in me in a rare burst of confidence, because she had felt it was so important for a boy to have a father.

The thought that she could have made such a mistake for my sake was horrifying to me but I concealed my feelings since I had no wish for her to know her sacrifice had been in vain. My stepfather was equally conscientious. We soon found out we were conspirators in a plot to prevent my mother guessing that he thought I was a hopeless enigma while I thought he
was a dreary bore, and for years afterwards we lived amicably beneath the same roof in an atmosphere of gentle but profound alienation.

People loved Velletria, Ohio. They probably still do. I thought I might like it better when my health improved sufficiently to allow me to attend a local private school, but I was wrong. I was a delicate child, small for my age, and I was regarded with such a callous mixture of curiosity and scorn that I soon carried a pen-knife to protect myself from the more vicious forms of hazing.

I was interested to see what happened when I was driven to use it. As it turned out I only attended school for one semester before my mother took me away, but I learnt some useful lessons so the experience was not unbeneficial. I learnt that it can be an advantage to be underestimated because people become overconfident and play carelessly into your hands. I learnt that one short sharp violent gesture can cow even the biggest bully. And I learnt that the art of survival in adverse conditions consists of stepping on other people before they can step on you. Achilles wasn’t the only warrior with a weak spot. Everyone was vulnerable somewhere. The trick was to isolate the weakness, slip it in a vice and turn the screws. True power, as I used to say to Sam,
pure
power was being able to put the invisible vice in mothballs and walk through a crowd knowing no one would dare step on you.

‘“Blessed are the Meek,”’ said another of my aunt’s samplers, ‘“for they shall inherit the earth.”’

‘Gee, I wonder how they’ll manage that,’ I remarked puzzled after my semester at school, but my mother thought I was being blasphemous and said severely that she had had just about enough of post-war godlessness and that it was a great pity I did not care to read some stimulating intellectual work on theology instead of confining myself to the sports pages of the
Cincinnati Inquirer
.

‘Yes, Mama,’ I said, meek enough to inherit the earth. I was terrified she would find out my favourite hobby was gambling.

I knew perfectly well I was the black sheep of my quiet cultured intellectual family, but I made heroic efforts to hide from them the full extent of my deviation. However, pretending to be something one is not is an exhausting occupation and as my adolescence continued I became progressively confused and restless. I loved my mother and sister but had nothing in common with them. My stepfather was like a man from Mars. I could not remember my own father well enough to know whether or not I resembled him. Who was I, I used to ask myself, and whoever I was, what was I doing in this well-bred, elegant and stupefyingly dull suburban Eden?

I was just asking myself this question for the hundredth despairing time when my mother returned to the dining-table after taking a phone call from New York and said to me in exasperation: ‘Your Uncle Paul seems determined to see you.’

[4]

Paul.

We met
at weddings and funerals. My mother’s marriage to Wade, Vicky’s marriage to Jason Da Costa, Paul’s marriage to Sylvia – I can dimly remember them all. I remember the funerals more clearly, the services commemorating my grandmother who was Paul’s sister Charlotte, my ancient great-grandmother who was Paul’s mother, and most tragic of all my bright pretty cousin, Paul’s daughter Vicky. Throughout these family occasions Paul never spoke more than a half dozen words to me, but the abiding memory of my childhood is of Paul entering a crowded room and all heads turning to look at him in respect, admiration and awe.

Occasionally during his business trips he would visit us in Velletria and then my mother would cling to him adoringly, my stepfather’s conversation would become almost interesting and my sister Emily would reach new heights of beauty and intelligence. I would watch, yearning to join in but trapped by the wretchedest feelings of inferiority, and sometimes Paul’s dark eyes would flick over me curiously as if he were wondering if I could possibly be as moronic as I appeared to be.

It must have been instinct not logic which made him send for me, but whatever his reasons he reached out his hand, pulled me out of that world where I had never belonged and drew me east across those Allegheny Mountains to that other world where he knew I would feel at home.