The Rich Are Different (36 page)

In early December on his first day back at the office and in full view of all his partners, he had the worst seizure of all and was rushed to hospital.

When I arrived I found his two greatest friends among his partners, Steve Sullivan and Charley Blair, waiting in the lobby.

‘Sylvia, we’re so sorry … thought we ought to discuss what we’re going to say … the press …’

‘High blood pressure,’ I said. ‘He fainted and now has to undergo treatment.’

‘Sylvia’s right,’ said Steve, and I left them debating together while I went up to Paul’s room.

He had drawn the curtains and was not resting in bed as he should have been, but sitting on the edge. His right arm was in a sling and there was a dressing on his head. His feet were bare. He wore only the hospital gown, thin, white and cold.

He looked at me but did not speak. Closing the door I gave him a kiss and sat down beside him on the bed.

‘Is your arm broken?’

‘Fractured.’

‘What did the doctors say?’

‘“Take drugs, lock yourself up and throw away the key.”’ When he swallowed awkwardly I saw his eyes were bright with tears and I got up at once to look out of the window. He would never have forgiven himself if I had seen him break down.

At last I said: ‘There must be something we can do. I can’t accept that there’s nothing.’

‘There’s nothing you can do. But if I could—’ He broke off.

There was a silence, but I thought of all he had told me about his illness, how he had kept it at bay for so many years with such complete success, and I knew what he had wanted to say.

I said tentatively: ‘Those evenings in Nassau—’

‘It was no good. I’ve got so little self-esteem left. That kind of expedition wiped it out altogether.’

I thought for a moment. My mouth was dry and my nails were digging into the palms of my hands. ‘It would make a difference, wouldn’t it,’ I said slowly, ‘if you could see someone you liked, someone who admired you, someone who knew nothing about all this.’

He did
not answer, only leant forward and stared at the floor. I sat down beside him again but before I could speak he said haltingly: ‘If I can get over this I know we can be together again. But you yourself can’t help me get over it.’

‘Then we must find someone who can.’

The silence seemed to go on and on. In a bizarre moment of fancy I felt as if every step I had ever taken in my marriage had led up to this point, and that now my entire future depended on what I said next. For a second I panicked. I thought I would never be able to decide what to do, but then my mind cleared, just as one’s mind so often does in moments of extreme crisis, and the solution seemed obvious. Either I loved him enough to do anything to make him well or I didn’t love him at all. It was as simple as that.

I said firmly: ‘Send for her.’

He raised his head. As he turned to look at me I saw the expression in his eyes.

‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s no need to answer. There’s nothing you have to say.’

‘Oh yes there is,’ he said, and taking my hands in his he said with all the passion I had waited thirteen years to hear: ‘I love you.’

1926

[1]

The brute
sent for me in 1925, just before Christmas. God, how angry I was! I damned nearly tore up the letter and jumped on it, but I made the mistake of reading it again, and before I had even finished the first paragraph I felt myself weakening beneath the onslaught of his charm.

‘Monster!’ I said aloud, grabbing a cigarette to steady my nerves, and my poor secretary who chose that moment to walk into the room snivelled threateningly. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Miss Jenkins, I wasn’t talking to you! Fetch me some more tea, would you please?’

‘Yes, Miss Slade.’ She fled. Next door on my left Harriet was saying in dulcet tones: ‘Oh yes, Lady Uppingham, we would be delighted … yes, we have acted as cosmetic consultants to a number of brides lately …’ while next door on my right Cedric was screaming into the telephone: ‘Who the ruddy hell do you think we are? Pedlars of paste to ruddy Woolworths?’

I was hunting for a match. I wished I had never started to smoke. The telephone rang again and beyond the open door of my office Mavis intoned through her nose: ‘Diana Slade Cosmetics – may I help you?’

I found a match, lit the cigarette and remembered I had been wanting to go to the lavatory for half an hour. I was just sneaking purposefully through the doorway when Cedric rang off with a crash, shot out of his office and blocked my path.

‘Honestly, Dinah, those bloody people from Gorringe’s!’

‘Goodbye, Lady Uppingham!’ crooned Harriet behind us.

‘Miss Slade!’ called Mavis from the reception desk. ‘Mr Hurst on the phone for you!’

‘Oh Lord. Coming, Mavis! Hold on, Cedric! Harriet, I hope you told that old trout that we have to have
carte blanche
with the facial.’

‘Darling, the
carte
is absolutely
blanche
and I’ve doubled the price of the wax treatment! Cedric, did you talk to Gorringe’s?’

‘Miss Slade—’

‘All right, Mavis.’ I sped back into my office, saw Paul’s letter still sitting on my desk and felt more in need of the lavatory than ever. I yanked the telephone towards me. ‘Yes?’

‘You’re throo-oo,’ sang Mavis.

‘Dinah? Geoffrey here. Look, I’m up in London unexpectedly – can you meet me for dinner tonight?’

‘Lovely, Geoffrey. Eight o’clock?’

‘I’ll pick you up at the flat.’

‘I’ll be
ready. Thanks. Excuse me if I dash now, but …’ I extricated myself, grabbed Paul’s letter and raced to the cloakroom. There in the peaceful gloom of my favourite end cubicle I had the chance to read the letter again without interruptions.

When I emerged I looked at myself in the glass above the basin. I was white with some emotion which I wanted to believe was still anger but which I strongly suspected was now a mixture of excitement and fright.

‘“Once more unto the breach, dear friends!”’ I quoted to my reflection, and wished I did not have such an urge to add: ‘“
Ave Caesar, te morituri salutant!
”’ I could not remember Tiberius Caesar’s exact reply to the gladiators’ assertion that they were about to die, but thought he had given some cynical retort such as: ‘Or not, as the case may be,’ whereupon the gladiators had taken great offence. Doubtless they had derived a morbid pleasure from their situation just as I was now deriving a morbid pleasure from mine. I laughed in an attempt to be debonair. After three years of innumerable cold business letters and studiedly unemotional personal correspondence, Paul was graciously allowing me another bite of the legendary apple of temptation. Well, if that was what he wanted that was what he was going to get but one day, I thought fiercely, one day Mr Paul Cornelius Van Zale was going to discover that he had got one hell of a lot more than he had bargained for.

[2]

I loved him. I had never loved any man before and had never loved any man since. By the December of 1925 I was secretly afraid I would never love any man again.

I was secretly afraid of so many things that it always amazed me when people occasionally remarked how bold I was. Of course they seldom meant it as a compliment, but there are nevertheless times when it is an advantage to be considered a tigress instead of a quivering jellyfish. If people believe you’re brave you may not only half believe them but even draw a spurious courage from their delusion.

The list of my fears stretched endlessly into the furthest reaches of my mind. They were all there, the big fears, the little fears, the real and the imaginary, the boundless and the groundless. I used to examine them minutely with loving care on my sleepless nights. I was afraid of being alone and unloved, although this fear had lessened considerably since Alan was born. I was afraid of dying. I was afraid of being poor. I was afraid of my business failing with the result that I would lose Mallingham, and losing Mallingham was my most racking fear of all. I could not conceive of a world without my home, the one place in a hostile world where I could retreat and feel secure. I felt I would have no stability without Mallingham, and I was mortally afraid of instability and its attendant demons of alienation and madness. My worst nightmare was of dying destitute in a lunatic asylum and being buried not at
Mallingham but in some pauper’s grave where I would be quite unable to rest in peace.

It will be obvious from this catalogue of neuroses that it was as well I had to work to save Mallingham, for if I had been wealthy enough to be a lady of leisure with all the time I needed to indulge my fears I would soon have become as eccentric as my father.

The irony of my situation was that I had always yearned to be ordinary. I believe this is a common desire among children from eccentric families, and certainly when I was obliged to put my father to bed after one of his chamber music orgies I longed to return to my grandparents’ Lincolnshire vicarage where I had once spent two quiet, well-regulated, blissfully conventional years. After my father’s third divorce I did go through a brief phase of vowing never to get married, but in fact I longed for a husband, children and the trappings of a respectable married life.

It was not until I was up at Girton and contemptuously labelled ‘bluestocking’ by young men who barely knew me that I realized sadly that I might be too well-educated to receive a marriage proposal. It seemed men were only prepared to overlook feminine intelligence if the woman were beautiful, and since I was fat and plain I saw no alternative but to abandon my dreams of a romantic white wedding, a tall dark handsome hero of a bridegroom and a leisurely honeymoon spent cruising the Greek Isles in a private yacht. Sinking myself in my studies I became the ‘bluestocking’ that everyone had already decided I was, and pretended with a nobility as false as it was nauseating that I was ‘above’ a sybaritic life. I had actually convinced myself I was happy in this role when my father died, but in the harsh events which followed I found I could no longer afford to cut myself off from men and wander around in an intellectual haze. I had to go down on my knees and crawl to those men for whatever help I could get.

I was told that Mallingham would have to be sold, and when I protested that I would work my fingers to the bone to buy it and keep it, I was told it was not suitable for a young girl to live alone and unchaperoned in a big house, not suitable for a young girl of my class to go into any form of business, and most definitely not suitable for a young girl of my station in life to be anything except a wife and mother, or if I were less fortunate, a spinster teaching in some old maid’s school.

These masculine rulings were presented to me in the great hall at Mallingham after my father’s funeral. Philip Hurst, Geoffrey’s father, was there with his partner, and there were solicitors representing my half-sister and half-brother. The vicar was standing by the fireplace with his hands folded, and the local doctor, who had attended my father during his last illness, stood beside him.

When they had finished I stood up. For the first time in all my encounters with the opposite sex my anger was stronger than my fear.

‘You
bloody
men!’ I shouted, and saw them flinch at my language. ‘How dare you speak to me as if I were a lunatic in need of a keeper! How dare
you speak to me as if I had no pride or self-respect! And how dare you say things to me that you’d never dare say to any man!’

They gaped at me. I despised them. ‘You listen to me!’ I said furiously. ‘I’m going to keep my home! I’m going to make the money! And I’m going to make you all look damned fools if it’s the last thing I ever do!’

One of them laughed. I shall always remember that. It gave me the courage to go on.

‘Don’t talk to me of losing everything I have!’ I cried. ‘I’m not interested in losing! The word “losing” doesn’t form part of my vocabulary! I’m only interested in winning!’

‘But my dear …’ Philip Hurst made a helpless gesture with his hands, and because I knew he was the only one in the room who cared what happened to me I did not interrupt him as he fumbled for his words. ‘You’d need a millionaire to help you out of this mess.’

‘Then I shall find one,’ I said, and walked out of the room.

An hour later I bicycled to the nearest telephone and asked my friend Harriet, who worked on the ‘Personalities of the Week’ page of
The Illustrated London News
, if there were any foreign millionaires in London at the time. I thought a foreigner, being more ignorant of the social structure than a native millionaire, might be more lenient towards my eccentric ambition.

‘… and it’s got to be someone who might like to help a girl in distress,’ I concluded to Harriet.

‘Well, there’s Paul Van Zale. He’s an American banker.’

‘Good. He’ll do.’

‘But Di, his reputation’s awful!’

‘So much the better!’ I said, and began to hatch my plans.

Since it was clear by this time that I had no hope of living a respectable conventional life I saw no point in hoping for a respectable conventional relationship with any member of the opposite sex. I knew I would have to sleep with Paul Van Zale, but for Mallingham I was prepared to sacrifice my virginity; it hardly seemed worth hanging on to it for a wedding night which would never take place. Besides, I have to admit that by that time (I was twenty-one) I was curious to discover whether copulation was as fascinating as everyone seemed to think it was. I was no longer religious so I was determined to have no moral qualms; I knew enough about Freudian theory to tell myself it was unhealthy to be prudish; and I was certainly desperate enough to sleep with a complete stranger. My one worry was whether Paul Van Zale would be desperate enough to sleep with me, but I reassured myself by remembering my father’s dictum that middle-aged men always found young girls attractive.

The more I thought about Paul Van Zale the more determined I became to detest him. As I was wheeled into his office in a food hamper I even thought: wretched man, forcing me to endure all this! I had never seen a photograph of him but I was convinced he would be short, fat and bald. Even the thought of his American accent made me shudder.