The Rich Are Different (105 page)

‘Never tell me,’ I said, ‘that something’s impossible! Run back and tell your boss that I refuse to play Chamberlain to his Hitler and if he offers me a bit of paper to sign I shall tear it up and scatter it to the winds!’

‘That’s not a very reassuring analogy, is it?’ he said casually. ‘After all no well-informed person seriously believes England can hold out for long against Hitler once war starts.’

I stepped back from him, my exhaustion forgotten and the rage streaming through me in a dark dizzy tide.

‘You bloody Nazi!’ I cried. ‘You just watch me beat Cornelius! And you tell him he’ll go to his grave knowing he never got the better of me!’

And leaving him stunned and speechless in the middle of the foyer I walked out of the Savoy with my head held high and the rage still roaring through my veins.

[3]

By the time I arrived home I felt I had been patriotic but unintelligent. I should have lingered with Sam to discover what Cornelius planned to do if I refused his proposal, although instinct told me that Sam would have given nothing away even if I had ultimately invited him to bed. He had given his loyalty to his own particular führer long ago at Bar Harbor and I knew that his loyalty would be both unswerving and incorruptible.

I studied my imaginary chess-board. Cornelius’ plans for Steve were easy to read; he wanted revenge not only for Emily’s humiliation, but for the
destruction Steve had wrought in Milk Street when he had left Van Zale’s. Cornelius’ plans for me were less easy to decipher but I was sure that despite all Sam Keller’s protestations those plans were hostile. As Sam himself had admitted it had been my money which had backed Steve, and I doubted that Cornelius would find that fact easy to forgive. Yet I could not imagine what he had in mind for me. His offer to set me up in business was obviously part of his revenge on Steve, but once he had had his revenge it was hard to predict his next move.

I studied Cornelius’ character again, but when I began to feel as if I were alone and blindfolded in a dark house with an armed robber bent on rape I mixed myself a stiff gin and french and phoned the nursing-home to find out if Steve was capable of receiving visitors.

The doctor was sympathetic, and after telling me Steve was making good progress he said I could call at the nursing-home the next morning for half an hour.

I had another drink, looked at my dinner, tried listening to the wireless and ended up reading Tennyson again. It was the anthology Paul had given me long ago. Usually I kept the book at Mallingham, but since I had rediscovered Tennyson’s poetry I had brought the book to London. For a long time I looked at Paul’s inscription on the fly-leaf, and then I thumbed through the pages until I came to the poem he had quoted.

‘I detest poems about war!’

‘Ah, but “The Revenge” isn’t really about war at all …’

I could hear our voices as if it were yesterday.

How comforting it must have been to have lived in Victorian times when all wars were little wars and England was impregnable! I had already heaved a sigh of nostalgia before I remembered ‘The Revenge’ had recalled a time when one small English ship had faced a fleet of the huge galleons of Spain.

‘
For some were sunk and many were shatter’d, and so could fight us no more – God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?
’

I fumbled for a cigarette and lit it. It was quiet in the house. Presently I began to read again.

I stopped. I could no longer see. Closing the book I moved restlessly through the house, but when I went to bed I slept badly and was already drinking coffee when the dawn broke over London.

At nine o’clock I telephoned Geoffrey in Norwich and asked if he could recommend a private detective agency, and by ten I was drawing out a cash
advance. After I had instructed the detective to keep a twenty-four hour watch on Sam Keller I stopped at Fortnum’s to buy Steve a tin of his favourite biscuits and then set off for Hampstead.

Halfway up the Edgware Road my chauffeur said to me: ‘Madam, I have no wish to alarm you but we’re being followed.’

I somehow managed to stop myself pressing my nose to the back window. ‘What kind of a car is it?’

‘One of those little Fords, madam. A 1935 model, I think.’

I wondered which detective agency Sam Keller was using. ‘Has he been following us for long?’

‘He was there when I was waiting for you in the City, madam.’

My own private detectives were in Fetter Lane. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Lose him, would you, Johnson? I detest invasions of privacy.’

Johnson lovingly caressed the Daimler’s wheel and we swept into the side-streets south of Maida Vale.

The Ford was lost in three minutes but I was shaken by how little I had fooled Sam Keller, and when we reached Hampstead I made Johnson leave me some way from the nursing-home.

A nurse showed me to the doctor’s consulting room. Again I was assured that Steve was making excellent progress but although the worst physical distress was over he was still heavily sedated.

‘When can he leave?’ I said.

‘I would recommend he stayed at least another two weeks, Mrs Sullivan, and preferably longer. It’s a great mistake in these cases to leave too early.’

‘Yes, I do understand that. Doctor, have you by any chance received inquiries from people who wanted to know if my husband was here?’

‘Not to my knowledge, and you can rest assured that if we did we would divulge no information of any kind. A large part of our success can be attributed to the fact that our patients have total privacy.’

I felt reassured and he took me upstairs himself to Steve’s room.

‘Half an hour, Mrs Sullivan,’ he said as he opened the door. ‘But no longer, please.’

‘Dinah!’ shouted Steve exuberantly. He threw his magazine at the ceiling, bounced out of bed, swept me off my feet and kicked the door shut.

‘Darling, I thought you were supposed to be heavily sedated!’

‘I’ve just had the most almighty stimulant!’

I laughed, clutched him greedily and forgot my fears about Sam Keller. I even forgot Cornelius.

‘Heavens, Steve, are we supposed to do this?’

‘Well, if I die trying,’ said Steve, ‘what a wonderful way to go.’

We laughed and kissed again. Later after he had survived with flying colours I told him how much better he looked, but when I saw the lines of strain in his face I knew he had suffered greatly. I sat down on the edge of the bed. At once he grabbed my hand as if it were a life-line and his hot tight trusting clasp was unbearably poignant. Tears filled my eyes, but I blinked them away and lit a cigarette. ‘Darling, we’ve only got a few
minutes and there’s so much to tell you …’ My voice became crisp and businesslike. I gave him the latest news of Elfrida and George and showed him Alan’s and Edred’s latest letters from school. I told him I had telephoned the office in Milk Street and had been assured that no disaster had happened in his absence. ‘Now tell me everything,’ I invited, still keeping a sharp eye on the time. ‘Has it been hell?’

‘Well, I’ve had better vacations. Oh Christ, Dinah, I don’t want to conduct a self-pitying monologue on how goddamned awful it is not to have a drink! Why do you keep looking at your watch? Who’s the lucky lover and when’s the assignation?’

‘The assignation’s come and gone, darling. I lunched at the Savoy yesterday with Sam Keller.’

I told him every detail of Cornelius’ offer. I thought it would be good for his self-confidence to hear my response, but his fighting spirit was so roused by the story that it was all I could do to stop him rushing headlong to the Savoy.

‘I’ll crucify that kid Sam Keller!’ he yelled.

I opened the tin of Fortnum’s best Scottish shortbread and offered it to him. ‘Have some of this, darling, and calm down. Sam Keller’s not a kid any more and neither’s Cornelius They’re two dangerous and determined men who would be only too delighted if you made a very public appearance in London after we had told everyone you had gone to America. Don’t give them the satisfaction of watching you play straight into their hands.’

He took a stick of shortbread and rammed it into his mouth. I mixed us each a glass of barley-water. ‘Cornelius obviously has a list of old scores to settle,’ I said. ‘It’s all frightfully Old Testament and tiresome of him, but the fact remains that if we stay together – and we shall – and if you get well – which you will – all his plans are going to misfire. He’s pulling out of London. We’ll be in different continents. If we sit tight and leave him well alone there’s not one thing he can do to touch us … Or is there? I keep wondering if there’s something I’ve missed.’

Steve drank his barley-water in one gulp, grabbed the box of shortbread and launched into a long muddled tirade about what he’d like to do to Cornelius. I listened absentmindedly. ‘Yes, darling,’ I said when he paused for breath. ‘But what would Cornelius like to do to me?’

Steve gave a short cynical laugh. ‘What most men would like to do, I guess. Then he could pat himself on the back and tell himself he’d followed in Paul’s footsteps all the way down the line.’

‘According to Sam, Cornelius isn’t much interested in Paul any more.’

Steve gave another short cynical laugh and an even shorter more cynical expletive.

‘Steve,’ I said. ‘Do humour me for a moment because this could be very important. We’ve underestimated Cornelius before and it’s absolutely essential, especially now we’re vulnerable, that we don’t underestimate him again. Now think. You know this man well and in fact you probably know him even better than you realize. Put yourself in his shoes. There I am in New
York – prospering in a cosmetic business which you yourself have so kindly sponsored. You have a list of old scores to settle with me. What would you do next? Are you really so sure you’d just jump straight into bed with me in order to follow in Paul’s footsteps?’

‘Dinah, I don’t care what Sam said to you yesterday. Cornelius worships Paul like a savage worships a totem pole.’

‘Then why should Sam give this impression of indifference – almost of a turning away from Paul? It made me wonder if Cornelius had been disillusioned in some way. You see, Steve, the interesting part is that Cornelius could hardly have known Paul. If he did hero-worship him I suspect he worshipped not Paul himself but the power Paul represented to him.’

‘Paul was certainly powerful,’ agreed Steve, ‘and he certainly liked to make everyone think he was tough as steel, but Jesus! He was soft as butter underneath, wasn’t he? Of course he kept it well hidden, but if Cornelius could have seen him on the morning of the assassination—’

A nurse looked into the room. ‘It’s time, Mrs Sullivan,’ she said pleasantly.

‘Five more minutes!’ wheedled Steve, and she smiled at him as she left the room.

‘Steve—’

‘Yes, that morning when he was weak as water, talking about giving everything up and running after you to England, a middle-aged man chasing a girl half his age – sorry, honey, but that was the way it seemed to me at the time! And when I think of the struggle I had to persuade him to file that last letter he wrote you—’

As the jig-saw of Cornelius’ personality revolved before my eyes, the missing pieces came sailing softly towards me out of obscurity.

‘That letter was never found, was it,’ I said.

‘Well, we worked that out years ago. We know Paul must have filed it before he died and Mayers burnt the file.’

‘Steve, that’s just what we don’t know. Supposing Cornelius read that letter and found out his totem pole was a fraud.’

‘It would certainly explain the inconsistency between my memory of him and the picture Sam gave you, but Dinah, there’s no way Cornelius could ever have seen that letter. He didn’t even start to work at Van Zale’s until after Bart Mayers was killed, so he would never had had access to your file.’

‘Unless the file survived.’ I started to tremble. ‘The file with the deed, Steve – the Mallingham conveyance—’

He bounded out of bed again, enfolded me in his arms and held me close. ‘Now honey, calm down. I know you’ve always had nightmares about that goddamned deed, but just listen to me. If that file survived I would have found it – but if I did slip up somehow and Cornelius found it instead, he couldn’t have stumbled across that deed. We never did know for sure that it was in the file and this just proves it couldn’t have been there. Just think for a minute. Can you seriously imagine Cornelius finding a weapon like that, and then keeping it in a closet like a pervert with a collection of feminine underwear? He’d
have been hitting us over the head with it long before now.’

There was a long silence before I said slowly: ‘Yes, I suppose that’s unanswerable. You must be right.’

‘Of course I’m right. If you’d ditched me and gone to New York Cornelius would have figured out a dozen different ways to screw you – in every sense of the word – but there’s no way he could ever have snatched your home.’

I began to feel better. When the nurse reappeared to send me on my way I was able to say goodbye calmly but although I offered to visit Steve again as soon as it was permitted he himself suggested I stayed away.

‘Sam’s more than capable of having you shadowed,’ he said, although I had taken care not to worry him with the story of the Ford. ‘Let’s leave nothing to chance, Dinah.’

I promised to write to him every day instead. Then I went home, and with me went the thought of Cornelius, his shadow floating on the surface of my mind like oil on water. I felt like someone who had developed a mortal illness. For short spells I would forget about him but then I would feel that subtle pressure on my memory and my knowledge would swing back sickeningly into my mind. I began to wish we had met. Reality could hardly have been more oppressive than the compulsive flights of my imagination.

I thought often too of Sam Keller and read my detective’s reports with interest. Sam was having a busy time. Every day of the working week he went to Milk Street, on weekends he had invitations to the country to visit clients, and in the evenings he spent much time wining and dining a certain American actress whom I was told he had met in New York. He never got drunk or made a fool of himself. His private life was discreet, his business life immaculate and various reports of his charm and good manners reached me as Van Zale’s in London was wound up with a swift, efficient, ruthless precision.