The Rich Are Different (51 page)

‘Dinah, are you feeling better? Can I come in?’

My heart banged against my ribs. I stood up hastily. ‘Yes, I’m much better now, Terence.’

Somehow I escaped without seeming as if I were rushing headlong from his apartment, and as soon as I reached the Plaza I telephoned Paul’s house.

‘I’m sorry, madam,’ said the butler, ‘but Mr Van Zale has given the strictest orders that he is not to be disturbed.’

‘But he’ll talk to
me
! Miss Slade – S-L-A-D-E—’

‘I’m sorry, madam—’

‘It’s urgent!’ I shouted at him. ‘It’s a matter of life and death!’

‘One moment, madam, I shall ascertain if Mrs Van Zale is at home to talk to you.’

‘No!’ I screamed, but he had gone.

I clutched the phone and stared wildly around the room. My first instinct was to ring off but I did not; I had to know if she decided to take the call. My second reaction was to hang up as soon as she had said hullo, but that idea too I rejected; I had to know what she intended to say. My third reaction was to plan a speech. Jane Austen would have phrased it delightfully. ‘Pray don’t be offended, Mrs Van Zale! I must apologize for offending your sensibilities in this distressing manner, but …’ No, that was really too nineteenth-century and Sylvia and I were twentieth-century women.

I thought of Schiller, glibly writing in
Mary Stuart
of a confrontation between two historical characters who in fact had never met. At least I had been spared a face-to-face meeting! But then as the line clicked I realized with dread that any face-to-face meeting would have been preferable to a faceless confrontation by means of that cold cruel modern instrument, the telephone.

‘Miss Slade?’

I tried to clear my throat. Nothing happened.

‘The butler said it was very urgent, but Paul was insistent before he retired that he wasn’t to be disturbed. If there’s some message …’ She paused politely.

I saw
her again before the marble fountain, no longer languishing in fragility but standing where I had once fooled myself I could stand, unbowed, unbeaten, winning.

‘Miss Slade?’

‘Yes,’ I said. It was so difficult to speak. I had to make a great effort to recall Greg Da Costa’s letter. ‘He – he mustn’t go to Wall Street tomorrow … The parade—’

‘Yes, he knows about that.’

‘But there’s something beyond the march – some plan – they’re all in it—’ I stopped myself from mentioning Terence’s name. I did not know how she felt towards him, and I could not risk her dismissing my suspicions because she refused to believe he could be involved. ‘Greg Da Costa’s implicated,’ I said unsteadily at last.

‘Da Costa!’ I heard the fear in her voice.

My strength was almost exhausted. ‘Tell him not to go,’ I whispered. ‘Persuade him to stay at home.’

There was a pause before she said: ‘Yes, I will. Thank you for calling, Miss Slade.’

We waited. Neither of us could hang up yet neither of us knew what to say. I was just thinking in panic that the conversation could only be ended awkwardly when she said in a quiet pleasant voice: ‘I hear you’re going home tomorrow, Miss Slade. May I wish you bon voyage?’ And while I remained unable to reply I heard the soft final click as she replaced the receiver.

[4]

It was hot and getting hotter. The New York summer seemed to consist of a series of crescendos, each culminating in a meteorological explosion; the temperature would increase, starting in the upper seventies, moving day by day through the eighties and finally soaring into the nineties. At that point a colossal thunderstorm would settle over Manhattan for some hours to bring the temperature down twenty degrees, but within a day or two the cycle would begin again. Ten days before a violent storm had followed a record temperature of ninety-four degrees and now the heat was increasing again, eighty-four for the past two days and ninety forecast for the morrow. I thought the storm would break that night. In the early hours of the morning when I was too hot to sleep I leant out of the window and waited for the thunder to bang blindly against the cliffs of the Palisades, but the storm never came, dawn broke swelteringly over the East River and by breakfast the mercury had already soared past eighty in its race to the nineties.

Mary and Alan were not due to arrive until the afternoon so my morning was free, but when I went out, walking east to buy a cup of coffee in a drugstore on Lexington Avenue, the fierce heat bludgeoned me into dizziness and I looked for a taxi to take me home.

Home made me think of Mallingham. I stood on the corner of a
crosstown street and while I waited for a cab I longed for Mallingham, for the cool fresh breeze from the sandhills of Waxham, for the singing reeds of Horsey Mere, for the damp ancient mysterious walls of my house. For a second I was there; I could touch the grass, caress the polished flint of the walls, smell the rosemary and thyme in the herb garden. But then a car hooted as I stepped unthinkingly into the road, brakes screeched, a driver bawled obscenities, and I was back in the sweltering chasms of Manhattan, trapped in a fierce prison of concrete and glass.

I had a great urge to talk to Paul but I knew it would be futile. I had destroyed the fragile bond created by my ignorance of his illness and could offer him no bond to take its place. I wanted to restore the bond but did not know how to renew it; I was too ignorant, too young, and in his pride he had withdrawn from me just as in my painful confusion I had instinctively withdrawn from him. Sheltering from the heat in another drugstore I tried in vain to see a solution to our estrangement, but all I saw was Paul’s bitter face and all I heard was his bleak judgement: ‘We’ve missed one another in time.’

In grief I wished he were younger, and in a moment of useless rage I saw again his vision of the ploughed field of eternity, and knew that the gap which separated his furrow from mine had ultimately proved unbridgeable.

I rubbed my eyes. I was outside in the street again and behind me a train roared along Third Avenue’s elevated railway. I started to move west, crossing avenue after avenue, and as the heat beat down upon me it seemed I was already moving sideways in time, crossing furrow after furrow to crawl back in relief to the world where I belonged.

It was noon when I reached the Plaza. My make-up had been ruined long before and my clothes were soaked with sweat. I had just dressed again after a shower and was drinking my third glass of water when the telephone rang.

Thinking it was Paul I rushed with a sob to the bedroom.

‘Hullo?’ I whispered into the mouthpiece.

‘Dinah.’

I did not recognize the caller’s voice. ‘Who’s this?’ I said confused.

‘Steve Sullivan.’

I still did not recognize his voice. A horrible premonition crawled through me and I had to sit down on the edge of the bed.

‘I’m downstairs,’ he said. ‘In the lobby.’

I could not speak. The room began to go dark before my eyes.

‘I have to talk to you,’ said the man. ‘Can I …’ He stopped as if he knew I would be unable to answer the question. ‘I’m coming up,’ he said, and rang off.

I went on holding the phone and listening to the empty line. At last the operator said: ‘Hullo, can I help you?’ and I replaced the receiver.

I waited, still sitting on the edge of the bed, and a long time seemed to pass.

When the soft knock came I could think only how odd it was that of all
the people I knew in New York it should be Steve who was with me at the end. I remembered him reeling out of Barney’s, posturing before me at his party, angering me with his irrepressible sexual appraisals whenever we had met.

I opened the door.

His blunt features were blurred with shock. His blue eyes were bloodshot. His wide straight arrogant shoulders were bowed with grief.

‘I had to come,’ he said, his lips hardly able to form the words. ‘I had to see you,’ and as he groped to take my hands in his I saw his suit was streaked with blood.

1926–1929

[1]

‘He
was assassinated,’ I said.

She burst into
tears. She
cried and cried. I had to remind myself that this was slick smart hard-boiled Dinah Slade, adventuress, trouble-maker and gold-digger de luxe.

‘I loved him!’ she sobbed. ‘I did, I did! Oh, I want him back, he’s got to come back, I can’t believe he’s dead!’

‘Believe it, honey.’ I sat her down on the couch and started opening closets. ‘Where’s the liquor in this place?’

‘There isn’t any,’ she said, sobbing louder than ever.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Calling my bootlegger, I told him to send his boy over at once with a bottle of rye. Then I dug out my hipflask and filled a couple of tooth-mugs to the brim.

She became calmer and I became number. When the rye arrived we started speaking to one another again.

‘I knew it was going to happen,’ she whispered. ‘I even telephoned
her
last night—’

‘I know. That’s why I’m here. Drink up, honey, and let’s exchange a little information before I put you on the ship to England. I have to know exactly what you’ve been up to.’

‘And I have to know exactly how he died.’ She was rock-steady now, her voice cold.

‘Maybe later—’

‘No. Now.’

I shrugged, opened the bottle of rye and topped up the toothmugs. ‘All right,’ I said abruptly, ‘this is the way it was …’

[2]

But I didn’t tell her the way it was. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d reduced Paul to rubble and I wasn’t going to start mentioning a conspiracy when I knew she was a close friend of the Claytons. Maybe she’d thought Paul had left her a fortune in his new will and had seen the chance of grabbing the money before he got wind of her plan to give him the gate. Since the world had gone crazy I felt I could believe anything, and anyway any woman who could twist Paul Van Zale around her finger so successfully had to be treated with the maximum suspicion.

I set down the bottle of rye. ‘He called me this morning,’ I said. ‘I was
staying in the city. He invited me over for a swim and we had breakfast together …’

My voice recited the facts but my memory saw beyond them to a scene I could never have described to her. I was in the pool, the famous indoor Van Zale pool with the gilded skylights and the miniature palm trees and the gallons of heated water glinting beneath the central chandelier. Paul and I had had a race and I had beaten him by half a length. That was when I knew he had to be sick and the next moment he proved it by starting to talk like a maniac.

He said his world was falling apart, that his life was finished and that he had no future. Somehow I got him out of the pool and into the changing-room. I could hardly believe that this was Paul, smooth, efficient, well-organized Paul Van Zale who arranged his personal life with the fluency of a fast pool operator jacking up the price of shares on the ticker. Then he revealed the final horror. He was out of his middle-aged mind over this expensive little jazz-baby with the plump hips, classical education and the keep-your-hands-off-me-you-brute English manners.

He poured out the whole story. I was so appalled I just stood there like one of those dumb Greek statues he used to like so much. It was only when he said he was going to throw up everything and run after her that I gasped for air, found my voice and ripped into him for all I was worth.

‘You’re crazy!’ I shouted. ‘Insane! This goddamned little girl runs three thousand miles when Elizabeth Clayton mentions the word “epilepsy” – she doesn’t want to know you, Paul!’

‘She’s been deceived – she was hurt and shocked – but if I were to go after her—’

He was white. His hands were shaking. I wondered if he was going to be ill but I know I’d be doing him no favour if I softened my attack. I had to dam up this craziness and bludgeon him back to his senses.

‘So go after her!’ I yelled. ‘But what about Sylvia? What are you going to tell her? What are you going to say? What do you think it’ll do to her? WHAT ABOUT SYLVIA, PAUL?’

He broke down. He sat stark naked on the bench in the changing-room, put his hands over his eyes like a little kid and shuddered with sobs. I’d never been more shocked in all my life.

‘You poor bastard …’ I draped a towel around him awkwardly and lit him a cigarette. ‘Here, have a smoke.’

He took a puff and choked. He wasn’t used to cigarettes. ‘I love Sylvia,’ he said.

‘Of course you do,’ I said, ‘and she’s the right wife for you, as you’ve been busy telling me for God knows how many years. Now listen, Paul. You’re going to get over this. Remember your smart sane sensible advice to me and all your other people on the subject of women.’

‘All that trash I talked!’ he said, the cigarette shaking in his fingers. ‘All that shit!’

I was glad to hear him use an obscenity. It meant he was toughening up.

‘Let’s get
dressed,’ I said. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had some break-fast.’

‘I can’t eat.’

‘Crap. Stop behaving like a half-baked poet. You’ve got to eat or you’ll be ill.’

I shoved him into his clothes, pulled on my own and marched him off to eat in the huge dining-room which was littered with dark sideboards and yards of velvet drapes and the Sargent portrait of his daughter Vicky smiling down at the Tudor banqueting table. I had half a melon, three eggs sunny side up, bacon, sausage, rolls and coffee. He had a slice of unbuttered toast and a cup of tea, but halfway through the slice he said: ‘Sorry I made such an exhibition of myself,’ and I knew he was on the mend.

He had just put some butter on the remaining half of his toast when Sylvia came in and ruined everything.

‘Oh Paul – excuse me, Steve – why is Wilson waiting outside with the car? You promised me you wouldn’t go to the office this morning!’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Oh, but—’ She broke off harassed. She was one of those women who look like an illustration out of some old-fashioned storybook for ladies, all pastel colours and pure thoughts and washed-out delicate features. I liked her; she was a nice lady, but she rang no bedroom bells on my particular switchboard. My wife Caroline used to make great capital out of the fact that Sylvia was the one woman Paul would never discuss with me but in my opinion the reason for that was obvious: there was nothing to discuss. In bed she would be placid and passive, dull and dutiful, and as I considered this picture with a yawn I found it easier to understand why Paul had dabbled with a red-hot, smart-aleck little go-getter like Dinah Slade.