The Rich Are Different (100 page)

‘I know. Don’t worry, Steve. The most important thing is that you should be free to establish the new house without distractions. Anyway I’m in no hurry because I want to rest between my two careers and enjoy the new baby.’

After the doctor had confirmed that I was at last a candidate for married motherhood, I had decided that this, my third and final pregnancy, was going to be the one I had the leisure to enjoy. Accordingly I delegated all my work to Harriet and only went to the office twice a week to make sure no one was murdering each other in my absence.

As I spent more time with the twins I was interested to discover how different they had grown from one another. Elfrida’s passion was animals; no
story was worth reading unless it had an animal in it, pictures of horses festooned the walls of her room and her white rabbit which lived at Mallingham was worshipped with all the ardour that the ancient Egyptians had reserved for their animal deities. Edred, on the other hand, cared for little except the grand piano. While his goldfish remained unfed and unloved in their bowl he would thump the keyboard with a concentration which amazed me, and with anxiety I wondered if this leaning towards music could indicate a resemblance to my father.

Meanwhile Alan was showing more resemblance to Paul; his new school was a success and suddenly as if by a wave of some magic wand he was coming top of his form in every subject and winning a place in his prep school’s first eleven. Presently he gave up reading books for schoolboys and embarked at the age of eleven on Dickens, Scott and Thackeray. By the time he was twelve he was reading Homer in the original and his headmaster was telling me with pride that a Winchester scholarship was a certainty.

I could hardly believe the transformation wrought by Alan’s change of identity, but the best part of the new Alan was his new attitude to the twins. He was no longer hostile but indulgent, and once I even found him helping them with their reading books.

All three children were encouragingly enthusiastic about the prospect of a new baby in the family.

‘I hope it’s a girl,’ said Elfrida who had just had a row with Edred about the latest corpse in the goldfish bowl.

‘I don’t care what it is,’ said Edred, ‘but if it has a good ear I’ll teach it to play the piano.’

‘It’ll be nice to have someone else to run errands for me,’ said Alan. ‘I hope it’s a girl because girls are easier to train.’

It was a boy. I was secretly disappointed but the baby was so good-natured that I soon forgot my regrets. He was the only one of my children who resembled me physically for the twins were little replicas of Steve and Alan was looking more like Paul as he grew older, but George had little wisps of dark straight hair and eyes that soon turned brown and a large flappy mouth which seemed to take up half his face. He was also much fatter than my previous babies but that only made him more cuddly.

It was Steve who decided that our son should be named after no less a hero than the patron saint of England, and he was so much enjoying being an Anglophile that I hadn’t the heart to tell him that St George had been a Cappadocian adventurer of dubious reputation. However, any warrior who can ride to sainthood on the myth of a slain dragon can at least claim to have been resourceful, and I raised no objection when the baby was christened George Steven at Mallingham Church.

It was soon after the christening that Steve went to the continent to woo a potential client who had interests not only in England but in France, Germany and Switzerland. He had been a client of Reischman’s, but in March 1935 when Italy invaded Abyssinia and Hitler adopted conscription in Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, the great House of
Reischman closed their doors for the last time in Hamburg and Hitler moved to annex the Reischman fortune. But the head of the House was too clever for him; Franz Reischman had already filtered the fortune into Switzerland, and still keeping one step ahead of his enemies he and his family slipped out of Germany on their long journey west to their cousins in New York.

Sam Keller, who was now Steve’s main contact at the New York office, was enthusiastic about Steve’s decision to go to Germany and thought he could profitably explore the vacuum left by the Reischman closing.

I thought of Hitler employing men like the notorious ‘Der Judenfresser’ who had once said that the head of a prominent Jew should be stuck on every telegraph pole from Munich to Berlin. I thought of Göring reviving the medieval chopping block and axe for capital punishment and declaring that the headsman must always wear impeccable evening dress. I thought of Goebbels declaring after the burning of books that Jewish intellectualism had finally been extinguished.

‘Well, business is business, honey,’ said Steve, ‘and you can’t judge all Germans by the antics of those goons around Hitler.’

‘People get the government they deserve,’ I said, but I said nothing else because I was a novice at banking and no one was denying the German economy had improved.

Steve was gone for two weeks and although we spoke on the telephone he divulged no details of his business negotiations until he arrived home.

I met him at the aerodrome. He looked very tired and I realized he had been drinking.

‘What happened?’ I said upset.

He slumped in the car beside me and when the chauffeur drove away I closed the glass partition.

‘The deal fell through with the Reischman client. He wanted money for a steel foundry and was hoping I could arrange for a flotation in America via Van Zale’s New York. It was a straightforward deal, but … Dinah, I can’t do business in that country. I talked to some of the Reischman men in Switzerland and they told me stories which made even the
Time
magazine paragraphs look pale.’

I was about to speak but he gave me no time. He was saying hurriedly as if he thought I would be disappointed instead of relieved: ‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful how Germany’s pulling itself to its feet at last, and all the Germans I met were very friendly to me. I’m not a preacher. I don’t go around passing moral judgements and I hope I’m not the kind of foreigner who walks into a country and tells it how to behave, but Dinah, Paul trained me and Paul was trained by Reischman’s. They picked him up when he was down and out and he never forgot what he owed them. Of all the Yankee houses in the Street ours was the most pro-Jewish, and when I think of our unwritten partnership with Reischman’s enduring year after year and surviving even Paul’s death, I know I just can’t go raising capital for Nazi Germany. Paul would turn in his grave. It would be a betrayal of all
that Van Zale’s stands for, but how in God’s name am I going to explain that to Sam Keller?’

I remembered that sociable charming voice and thought I could imagine the young man who owned it. ‘Sam would understand, wouldn’t he?’

‘Not a chance. He’s a Nazi sympathizer.’

‘Surely not!’ I was genuinely shocked.

‘Oh, they know all about Sam Keller at Reischman’s. Apparently when he came back from a visit to Germany in ’33 he was saying “Heil Hitler” all over New York.’ He reached for his hipflask, the legacy of Prohibition, and unscrewed the cap. ‘But I don’t want to get into a fight with Sam before I’m ready to quit Van Zale’s,’ he said after a mouthful of whisky, ‘so I’m going to pretend that although the deal fell through the visit was a success in establishing promising German contacts. That’ll give us time to push ahead with our plans before Sam realizes I’ve been lying.’

‘I’ll talk to Lord Malchin,’ I said. ‘I really do think he might be interested in making another offer for the business. Harriet said Lady Malchin had invited her to dinner again.’

The next three months were nerve-racking. Lord Malchin’s Pharmaceutical and Cosmetics Products nibbled tentatively at the prospect of acquiring the business but made an offer I refused to consider. I was determined not only to get the best price but to get the best possible deal for my friends who worked with me. I started to woo Sir Aaron Shields of Shields Chemicals who manufactured everything from cosmetics to dynamite, but Sir Aaron looked bored. However, Lord Malchin thought he had a rival and made a better offer. After that there was a pause; Sir Aaron still yawned, Lord Malchin rested serenely on his laurels and I became rapidly more distraught.

‘Oh, for God’s sake let me fix this!’ exclaimed Steve exasperated and to my astonishment extracted a large bid from a cosmetics firm in New York. Lord Malchin dropped his monocle, Sir Aaron looked winded and the two of them plunged into an orgy of competitive bidding.

The New York firm retired. They had only made the bid because they had owed Steve a favour, but Lord Malchin and Sir Aaron battled on until Lord Malchin, who was not only richer but more benign towards my colleagues, won.

Three and a quarter million pounds changed hands gracefully and Steve began negotiations with the American investment banking house of his choice, a firm called Miller, Simon. It was a young house, founded in the twenties by men who had trained with Kidder, Peabody in Boston and Halsey, Stuart in Chicago, and it was one of the few aggressive young firms which had survived to see the dawn of the New Deal.

Our plans were progressing smoothly again, and it was not until Mr William LeClair of Miller, Simon arrived in London for his annual European holiday that we realized we were being watched with growing suspicion from One Willow Street.

For the first time in two years Steve received a direct communication from Cornelius.

[1]

Cornelius
sent a letter. It was an extraordinary work, Victorian to the point of artificiality and calculated down to the dot of the ‘i’ in his signature to drive Steve into a towering rage. The letter was typed on thick white paper embossed with a Fifth Avenue address, and I was with Steve at the breakfast table when he ripped open the envelope.

‘Dear Steve,’ Cornelius had dictated primly. ‘I have now waited two years in the hope that you might feel constrained to offer me some explanation of your conduct when you abandoned my sister in order to pursue your obsession with Miss Slade. Unfortunately I have waited in vain. However, the purpose of this letter is neither to tell you how profoundly upset I was by the injury to my sister nor to censure you on your choice of sexual partner; the past, though iniquitous, is unalterable. On the contrary my purpose in writing this letter is because I wish you to know that I am deeply concerned for our future professional relationship.

‘Your reports to Sam about your triumphant progress through Germany were, as we now realize, grossly inflated and as far as we can judge your expedition there served no useful purpose. I concede you have acquired an impressive roster of clients in London but I am now informed by the same source which earlier reported to me the news of Miss Slade’s sixteen-million-dollar coup d’état that you have been flirting mysteriously with the senior partner of Miller, Simon. If you have a valid explanation of why you should bother to spend so much money cultivating this sound but second-rank house I should very much like to hear it.

‘Perhaps you should consider returning to New York to review the future of our partnership. I cannot say you should consider returning to my sister, since I am convinced she is better off without you, but she is loyal to you even to this day, and has won the unstinted admiration of all New York by her devotion to you and your children. Her heroism is not diminished simply because it is misguided. In fact the hardship of recent years has revived again in America a respect for decent moral values and other Christian concepts of which you appear to be totally ignorant. Perhaps it is time you ceased to be an expatriate in an environment of decadence and returned for a visit to the time-honoured traditions of our native land.

‘I remain with respect and sincerity, your partner, CORNELIUS.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ yelled Steve and rushed headlong from the breakfast-table.

Alan was away at Winchester by that time but I hastily told the astonished twins to finish their breakfast while I went to inquire what was wrong. In the library I found Steve already in the middle of an incensed reply and when I asked if I could read the letter he merely grunted his assent.

Seconds later I burst out laughing. ‘Honestly!’ I exclaimed in delight. ‘I
haven’t read anything so entertaining since Lady Bracknell’s dialogue in
The Importance of Being Earnest!’
You’re not taking it seriously, I hope?’

He looked at me with suspicion, his pen motionless.

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I said carelessly. ‘He wants to quarrel with you so that you resign immediately. Then once you’re no longer a Van Zale partner he’ll be free to launch all kinds of nasty rumours about you before you launch our new house. It’s clear he’s found out exactly what’s going on.’

There was a silence. When he did not look at me I realized he was not only angry that he had failed to see the trap, but mortified that I had recognized it on sight.

‘Steve …’ I was deeply embarrassed, wishing I had had the sense to point out the truth in such a way that he could have pretended he had discovered it himself, but before I could say anything else he had cut off my apologies with an impatient movement of his hand.

‘Hell,’ he said, ‘you’re right. Damn the little bastard. I won’t reply at all.’ And he tore up his unfinished letter.

‘Steve,’ I said with tact, ‘wouldn’t it be better if—’ I ran out of tact and stopped awkwardly.

‘Go on,’ he said dryly. ‘I’ll listen. God knows where Cornelius is concerned I need all the help I can get.’

It was an admission a lesser man could never have made. Kissing the top of his head I smiled at him in admiration and said squarely: ‘Act as though you’re much too good-natured to quarrel seriously with him. Sound annoyed but above all tolerant and even vaguely amused.’

There was another pause. ‘Sure,’ he said. He took a fresh sheet of paper and sat looking at it.

‘I’ll do a draft if you like,’ I said, ‘and then you can alter it as much as you like, just as you would alter a letter submitted by your secretary.’