The Rich Are Different (12 page)

He stared at me. By providing him with a novel idea I had at least succeeded in calming him down. Finally he said with a touching naïvety: ‘Do you mean you approve of emancipated women?’

‘Good God, no, I’m a man! Why should I want to alter a world that suits us all so well?’

He did not hear the irony in my voice. ‘But you just said—’

‘Didn’t they teach you in law school to argue a case from both sides?’

He nodded, fascinated. ‘I
always thought Dinah would turn out like her mother,’ he commented at last. ‘She always swore she wouldn’t, but now I can see she has.’

This was the first interesting remark he had made. ‘Dinah’s mother was an emancipated woman?’ I said quickly.

‘Oh, didn’t she tell you? She was a suffragette who got arrested and died in prison. Actually she died of tetanus – her throat was damaged during the forcible feeding and an infection set in.’

‘Mr Hurst,’ I interrupted with my most hospitable smile, ‘may I offer you a little glass of madeira?’

He drank three glasses of madeira while I gently milked him of information. When I had gathered enough details to make O’Reilly’s file on Dinah Slade bulge at the seams, I rose to my feet, smiled regretfully and said that I really did have to return to my work.

‘So nice of you to stop by,’ I murmured, taking his hand and pressing it fondly. ‘Do give my warmest regards to your father, won’t you?’

He said he would. I suspect he did not remember his rage until O’Reilly had escorted him from the building, and I wryly pictured him gnashing his young teeth all the way home to Norwich.

He was a nice boy but he had a lot to learn.

[5]

‘I’ll shoot Geoffrey when I next see him,’ said Dinah.

‘That would be not only tiresome but unoriginal. Why are you so ashamed of your mother? You needn’t be ashamed of her with me! I always admired the suffragettes. Such ambition! And such an eye for publicity! They deserved to get what they wanted.’

‘I despise misplaced idealism! They would have got what they wanted sooner if they hadn’t antagonized every man in sight. All this women’s emancipation nonsense makes me ill, it’s so trivial. The real issue of the modern world is the struggle between socialism and capitalism, and it would make a lot more sense if women fought for a doctrine which declared that all people should be equal.’

‘But if you fight for a political doctrine, doesn’t it help to have a vote?’

‘Oh, you think you’re so clever! I’m sorry, but I can’t regard my mother as a heroine. I think she wasted her life and died a fool, and if I were religious I’d go down on my knees each night and pray the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. I refuse to discuss my mother, I refuse to discuss emancipation, and I absolutely refuse to think it’s heroic to throw away one’s life without a damned good reason.’

I saw at once that her mother’s desertion, even though it had been involuntary, had had an effect from which she had still not recovered, and to deflect the conversation towards less painful subjects I said lightly: ‘Talking of heroic idealism, have you ever read Tennyson’s poem “The Revenge”?’

She was her old self again in a flash. ‘Paul,’ she said laughing, ‘if you
mention that wretched Victorian doggerel-pedlar to me one more time I shall scream! Yes, I believe I was forced to read it once at school. I detest poems glorifying war.’

‘Ah, but “The Revenge” isn’t really about war at all. It’s about romance and idealism and all the other qualities which the war has made unfashionable. Read it some time when you’re so jaded you have nothing else to do but sneer at the world!’ I advised her good-humouredly, and remembering my earlier promise I bought her an anthology of Tennyson’s poetry with the intention of giving it to her as a parting present. However, I was still not sure when I was going home. Realizing I would have to spend longer with Hal than I had anticipated I had written to Sylvia to tell her I would join her in Maine in mid-August, but I was seriously thinking of staying in England until early September. A little yachting vacation on the Norfolk Broads was a very tempting prospect.

Meanwhile, my weekends at Mallingham were becoming steadily longer, and on the twenty-ninth of July, the day I had originally planned to sail home, I was tacking across Horsey Mere with Dinah once again and thinking how infinitely preferable it was to be in a dinghy on the Norfolk Broads than in a liner on Southampton Water.

We concluded our traditional walk to the sea, took our traditional stroll along the beach and retreated to our traditional hollow. ‘What a rut we’re sinking into!’ I said to Dinah as I started to undress her.

I had not made love to her for several days for the usual reasons, and I had not made love to her in broad daylight for almost two weeks. Dinah had unexpectedly developed a preference for drawing the drapes when we had retired to her room during the day, and on our previous visit to the sandhills a party of naturalists had inconveniently decided to conduct a bird-watching session within peeking distance of our favourite hollow.

‘Remember those awful people on the beach last time?’ said Dinah, pulling me close to her.

‘Vividly. Aren’t you going to take off any more clothes?’

‘I’m cold.’ She shivered unconvincingly, and added as I tried to ignore the complaint: ‘No, honestly, Paul, I’m freezing! Do you think it’s going to rain?’

‘You’ve almost convinced me it’s going to snow. Good God, look over there!’

She looked away obediently. I had unhooked her bodice and pulled it away even before she had time to yell in protest, but her yell of protest never came and neither did my next gesture of affection.

[6]

There was a long silence.

I looked at her breasts, saw the small but unmistakable changes and knew that our personal relationship was finished. I said abruptly: ‘You’ve
lied to me, haven’t you?’ And as the tears streamed silently down her face I felt myself slipping away from her down the treacherous slope into the past.

[1]

‘Papa!’ cried Vicky. ‘I’m going to have a baby!’

I was in New York, at the brownstone where she had lived after her marriage.

‘Well, Paul,’ said Dolly as the decades slid backwards before my eyes. ‘It looks like I’m going to have a baby.’

I was in my chambers at Oxford and Dolly wore her parlourmaid’s uniform beneath her shabby coat. Dolly was blonde and pert with an upturned nose which Vicky had not inherited and the violet eyes which Vicky had transformed with her vivacity.

I wanted to stay with Dolly but I could not for I was sliding backwards in time again until my mother said to my father at the house on Nineteenth Street: ‘Charlotte’s having a baby. I suppose all we can do is pray it’s not afflicted.’

‘God damn it, Edith!’ shouted my poor father, his guilt making him much too sensitive. ‘I refuse to tolerate any further snide references from you to the family weakness …’

My father was a stupid man who possessed a certain basic measure of common sense. My mother was a clever woman who thought common sense was admirable but too often the hallmark of a pedestrian intellect. It was popularly supposed by everyone, themselves included, that they had a happy and successful marriage.

‘Marriage,’ said my mother to me after my father’s death when we were obliged to sort out his debts and pay off his mistresses, ‘should not be a single railroad track but a line permitting travel in both directions. Of course, your father married me for my fortune – and why not? He needed money and he was not the sort of man who could ever have earned his living in a manner acceptable to someone of his class. But I hardly came away empty-handed from the altar! I got a handsome, charming, well-bred husband and that’s something every innocent girl longs for, especially girls who are as plain as I was. Of course, I knew all about the other women, but what else could I have expected? Your father never opened a book and despised culture, and he had to have some way of amusing himself in the evenings.’

However, I was only fifteen years old when my father died, I had led a sheltered life, and I was deeply shocked. I had often been frightened of my
father but I had hero-worshipped him devoutly and longed to be like him. It was many years before I could regard him as dispassionately as my mother, and during the latter years of my adolescence I recoiled from the thought of his shoddy private life.

Meanwhile my mother had succeeded in her dearest wish and made a classical scholar of me. It was she who hired my tutors – the only stipulation my father ever made regarding my education was that I should be taught to read and write – and when no tutor succeeded in meeting her exacting requirements, she taught me herself, just as she had once taught my sister Charlotte. Charlotte was ten years my senior and good with children; she used to play with me endlessly when I was a toddler, and when she married at eighteen and went away I wept all night into my pillow. In my lonely childhood Charlotte had too often been my sole companion, and when I became an uncle at the age of nine I regret to say I regarded my niece Mildred with all the jealousy of an only child who wakes one morning to find himself obliged to share his parents with an objectionable new infant.

To ease the situation my mother suggested that Charlotte and I should write to one another once a week in Greek. Constructing a suitable Greek epistolary style would, she thought, undoubtedly take my mind off my jealousy. Charlotte suggested more humanely that I should instead visit her so that I could see she hadn’t forgotten me, but my health was poor at the time, and it was considered impossible for me to make the long journey from New York to Boston.

I was so disappointed by this decision and so frustrated by my life of absolute seclusion that my parents once more took me to the leading doctors, but all the doctors said there was no hope. The illness ran raggedly through the family, usually passing by the females and affecting two males in three. Few of those afflicted survived childhood; the illness was severe in infancy and led to complications such as skull fractures which often resulted in death. The Van Zale males who survived infancy were either born healthy like my father or else never mentioned, like my father’s brother or the long-forgotten great-uncle who had spent his days in seclusion.

‘I regret to say there is as yet no cure for this most distressing affliction,’ said the last doctor. ‘This is unfortunately a cross which the child must become resigned to bear.’

My father drew himself up to his full height. I saw his splendidly luxuriant moustaches bristle with antagonism. ‘You may advocate resignation to my son, sir,’ he said with all the pigheaded stubbornness for which he was famous, ‘but I never shall.’ And turning to me with immense dignity he announced grandly: ‘
I
shall cure you, my boy.’

Acting on the Victorian principle that a
mens sana
must inevitably repose in every
corpore sano
, he proceeded to devote every moment of his time during the next five years to transforming me into a healthy sportsman. I was dragooned into swimming-pools, dragged on twenty-mile hikes and drummed on to the tennis court. My mother objected fiercely; I think it
must nearly have terminated their marriage. Charlotte thought he would kill me. The doctors said he was a fool.

But I lived. I was transformed. He won.

How he achieved my transformation must always, I suppose, be a medical mystery for sheer exercise alone can hardly have been responsible for my improved health. Later I strongly suspected that an element of faith-healing was involved. I believed without any doubt that my father could cure me, and combined with my childish faith was my passionate desire to live a normal life. However, there was no denying that my health improved enormously, and when I was fourteen and had been well for over nine months, my father decided that I could at last meet a contemporary from the outside world. When we retired to Newport that summer, he immediately called on our neighbours the Da Costas and asked if the son of the house would join us one morning for tennis.

I was three years younger than Jason Da Costa but my father had coached me so rigorously that I was already capable of winning a game against boys of seventeen. I would have been more than a match for Jay Da Costa if I had not suffered so acutely from nervousness in his presence, and when I found that his habitual manner was one of condescending arrogance I became obsessed with the fear that he already knew about my illness. My father assured me this was impossible; he had long since boldly informed the world that I suffered from asthma and any servants who had found out the truth had always been dismissed before they could gossip. Yet my fears continued and as I lost every match by an ever-widening margin my father’s patience with my performance became increasingly threadbare until at last he bawled out from the side-lines: ‘For God’s sake, Paul, stop behaving like a namby-pamby little idiot!’

In misery I turned back to face Jason Da Costa, and there was my nightmare become reality, the eerie distortions at the far end of my vision.

Afterwards I could remember their faces, both ash-white and strained. My father was rigid with tension but Jay was shivering like a dog, his arrogance smashed and his composure destroyed. My father made him promise he would never reveal what he had seen.

I thought I would die of the shame.

‘And if you ever break that promise, Jason—’

‘No, never, Mr Van Zale, I swear it.’

He went away. My father watched him go and wiped the sweat from his forehead. No one ever came to play tennis with me again, and the following year when my father died we had to sell the cottage at Newport.

Ironically that was my last relapse. After that incident with Jay I was well for over thirty years.

A year after my father died my mother decided I should have some masculine company, and as my health had been perfect for many months she took a risk and sent me to Newport to stay with the Clydes. Mrs Lucius Clyde was her sister and my cousins the Clyde boys were my own age. To Lucius Clyde himself, the senior partner in the investment banking house
of Clyde, Da Costa, my mother awarded the dubious role of substitute father. The Clyde boys thought I was undersized and eccentric while I thought they were boring illiterate morons. I hated my summer at Newport and I hated it even more when I was once more confronted with my cousins’ best friend, Jason Da Costa.