Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  I didn’t bother to answer. Who could be disappointed by having two sons? I said good-bye and hung up before it occurred to me that I still had no idea who had been talking to Elfrida about the past.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I considered every angle of the mystery over and over again until at last, inevitably, my thoughts began to focus on Tony Sullivan; I was remembering how strongly he had insisted that the children should be told the truth.

  I had taken charge of Tony in 1933 when I had taken charge of Scott, but Tony and I had never got along, and eventually he had turned his back on me and sailed off to England to live with his father’s last family; Steve was dead by that time, but Dinah had given Tony a home with Alan and the three little kids at Mallingham in Norfolk, where her family had lived for centuries. Scott, staunchly loyal to me, had quarreled with Tony at about this time, and after Tony went to England, the brothers remained estranged and never met again. This had, of course, been a great relief to me. I knew what kind of stories Tony would have heard about me as soon as he had begun his new life at Mallingham.

  I went on thinking of Tony. I felt no emotion. That had all been spent long ago. Back in 1931 Tony had given me mumps, that stupid kid’s disease which was to mar my whole life, and once I had found out I was sterile, I had never been able to look at him without remembering and remembering and remembering. … I didn’t blame him, exactly—after all, it was hardly his fault—but I just remembered. He was a reminder. He also looked like Steve. That made me remember, too. He was a reminder of too damned much. I also had this odd feeling that he was destined to be my permanent nemesis. It’s a strange fact of life that certain people’s paths intersect periodically with one’s own, sometimes with beneficial results, sometimes with a disastrous aftermath, and for me Tony Sullivan had always provided the catalyst for disaster.

  As I lay awake worrying that night, I thought: Tony’s at the bottom of this somehow. But how? He died in 1944. Or did he? Perhaps he survived … prisoner of war … amnesia … only just recovered … returned to Mallingham …

  Sleep mercifully put an end to these neurotic fantasies, but the next morning I woke up and began to worry all over again. Throughout the day I told myself repeatedly: The past is dead. The past can’t touch me anymore. But then came the bombshell.

  Elfrida herself arrived at the Savoy and demanded to see me.

  III

  I was dressing for dinner at the time. Sam and Vicky were due to take us out that evening to a show.

  “There’s a Miss Sullivan downstairs, sir,” said my aide. “She wants to know if she can come up.”

  I opened my mouth to say no, but the words which came out were: “Let me talk to her.” I had to get to the bottom of this mystery before I left England. It was all very well to reassure myself by saying that nobody could prove anything and that Scott would always take my word against Elfrida’s, but I just didn’t want Scott upset. Taking the receiver from my aide, I said pleasantly into the mouthpiece, “So it’s you again! I hope you’re not still playing at being prosecuting attorney. What charges do you want to press today?”

  “I want to talk to you about Mallingham,” said Elfrida.

  Dinah Slade’s old home had found its way into Paul’s hands in 1922, and when he had died four years later, the property had devolved to me as his heir. The house was a charred ruin, but the land was still mine. I had had some vague idea of transferring it to the National Trust, since the acreage was in an area which they wanted to preserve, but I had never been able to summon the mental energy to issue the necessary orders to my lawyers. I always tried not to think of Mallingham, since it inevitably reminded me of Steve and Dinah and a whole series of events I knew it was wiser to forget. I didn’t want to think of it now.

  “Look, Elfrida, I’m a busy man and I don’t have the time to waste raking over the past with you—”

  “I want to talk about the future.”

  I supposed she wanted her old home back. To my relief, I suddenly saw how I might appease her and neutralize the danger she represented. “Okay, come up,” I said, and abruptly severed the connection.

  IV

  She was a tall girl, large-boned and masculine, her curly hair cut short. She wore no makeup and her clothes were unflattering. Her eyes were a bright light blue.

  I had taken a couple of pills for my asthma and was breathing evenly. I had dismissed everyone from the suite except Alicia and her maid; I could hear them talking to each other in the far bedroom as I went out into the hallway to open the door.

  Elfrida was twenty-three years old. She had taken a degree in English at Cambridge University and had afterward spent a further year obtaining a teaching diploma before applying for a position in a private school near Cambridge. Her twin brother, Edred, taught music at the same school, but according to Emily, was trying to get a job in an orchestra. The younger boy, George, had finished his last year at boarding school and was scheduled to go to one of the newer English universities in the fall. Emily had told me what he intended to study, but I had forgotten. I wished I could forget all the English Sullivans, all Europe, and indeed everything and everyone east of the state of Maine.

  Opening the door, I told Elfrida to come in.

  “Right,” I said, leading the way into the sitting room but not inviting her to be seated. “I’m about to go out, but I guess I can spare you a minute or two. You should have called for an appointment. Now, what’s your problem? Do you want the Mallingham lands back? I’d planned to give them to the National Trust, but if you like, I’ll donate them to you instead. I would have offered earlier, but after you and Edred deliberately cut yourself off from me—”

  “Thank you,” said Elfrida neatly, “I accept the offer. How kind of you. And while you’re about it, you can write me a check for a million dollars.”

  That rocked me. It was not simply the request for money; I was well accustomed to such requests from the indigent. Neither was it simply the ridiculous amount involved; I was well aware that the indigent often lose touch with reality. What shocked me was the hint of extortion, the implication that I owed her a huge sum in order to compensate her for a great loss. What shocked me was the buried past erupting out of its sealed coffin and even threatening bizarrely to repeat itself. Her mother, Dinah Slade, had once asked for ten thousand pounds from my great-uncle, Paul Van Zale.

  “A million dollars?” I said. I knew I should laugh and exclaim: “You’re kidding!” but all I could say was, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I want to start a school,” said Elfrida, still the picture of serene self-confidence. “I’ve decided to rebuild Mallingham Hall, restoring it as far as possible, and turn it into a boarding school for girls. I shall name it in memory of my mother. She was very interested in education for women.”

  “I see.” I got a grip on myself. “How very commendable!” That sounded too silky, too insincere. I groped for a better tone, a more even tone, the tone of a philanthropist who believed in encouraging worthy schemes. “Well,” I said mildly, “I am, as you know, a charitable man, and for many years I’ve set aside a certain portion of my wealth for my educational trust. I see no reason why I shouldn’t help you, but of course we must approach this project in a sensible manner. I can’t just sit down now and write you a check for an amount which sounds to me totally excessive.”

  “You owe me every cent of it!”

  “I think not,” I said, still very mild. “I did my best for you when you were orphaned, and despite your recent efforts to insult me, I’m prepared to do my best for you now by putting you in touch with the Van Zale lawyers in London and my educational trust in New York.”

  There was a pause. I made a quick calculation. Of course it would all be deductible. My accountants would be very pleased, and so would I. The net loss to me would be minimal, and I would have the satisfaction of knowing I had permanently muzzled the most dangerous of the English Sullivans by smothering her with Christian charity. E
ven Emily would approve.

  Elfrida was looking suspicious. Although inexperienced in the ways of the world, the girl was clearly no fool. “I want all that in writing,” she said.

  “Of course—on the understanding that you stop announcing to all and sundry that I killed your father. If I ever hear that you’ve been behaving so irresponsibly again, I shall withdraw my financial support.”

  She gave me a look which reminded me of her father. There was amusement mingled with the scorn, irony with the contempt. “Just give me the money,” she said, “and spare me the exhibition of guilt.”

  I laughed. I produced my most radiant smile. “But of course you can have the money! I’m happy to give it to you. I just wanted to make sure we understood each other, but I’m really not the ogre you believe me to be! Oh, and talking of what you believe … just who’s been trying to persuade you that I was responsible for your father’s death?”

  Elfrida’s head jerked up. Her expression puzzled me. She looked thoroughly bewildered. “Don’t pretend you don’t know!” she said automatically.

  I had a sharp premonition of disaster. I kept my face impassive, but my hands interlocked tightly behind my back. “Of course I don’t know! If I knew, I’d sue the bastard for slander!”

  “You can’t sue a dead man.”

  I stared at her. She stared back, still skeptical of my ignorance, but finally she wrenched open her purse and pulled out a tattered envelope.

  “I did bring the letter,” she said, “but I hardly thought I’d need to remind you of its existence.”

  I knew I was on the brink of some appalling abyss, but I knew too I could not stop myself toppling into it. I went on staring at her. Then I realized I was staring at the letter. The ache of tension started to twist in my lungs.

  “Don’t tell me no one’s ever shown you Tony’s letter!” Elfrida burst out incredulously. “Don’t tell me no one’s ever confronted you with it and demanded an explanation!”

  “Tony,” I said. “Yes. I knew it was him. It had to be Tony, always Tony … Tony wrote a letter?”

  “He wrote it in 1944 just before he went to Normandy. Alan had been killed, and Tony wanted to be sure that if he were killed too, Edred, George, and I wouldn’t grow up in ignorance of how our parents died.”

  “Nineteen-forty-four. He wrote the letter in 1944.”

  “Yes. He typed it and made two copies.”

  “Copies. Did you say copies?”

  “Yes, he put all three copies in separate envelopes and left the lot with my mother’s solicitors in Norwich with instructions that the top copy should be held there until Edred and I were eighteen. Didn’t you wonder why you never heard from us again after January 1948? That was when we got our copy of Tony’s letter.”

  “And the other two copies …”

  “… were posted to America as soon as Tony was killed in 1944. One went to Emily. Tony felt guilty that he had abandoned her home to live at Mallingham, and he felt he owed it to her to explain just why he had turned so completely against you. And then of course the last copy of the letter went to—”

  “Scott,” I said.

  “Who else?” said Elfrida.

  V

  I was breathing very carefully—in, out … in, out … in, out. I had to think about my breathing. I could not afford an asthmatic scene. In, out … in, out.

  “Tony wanted Scott to know everything too,” Elfrida was saying. “He was upset that they’d become estranged, and he hoped that if Scott read the whole story in a posthumous letter he might at last be able to believe the truth. Of course Tony planned to see Scott after the war and make another effort to convince him, but he was taking no chances. That letter was his insurance that the truth would survive.”

  I couldn’t think of Scott. I wanted to, but I knew it would upset me too much. I wanted to tell Elfrida to stop talking, but I didn’t dare speak. I had to wait. I must do nothing that might disturb the rhythm of my breathing. Did I dare hold out my hand, or would even that small physical exertion prove fatal? In, out … in, out. No, I had to risk it. I had to know.

  I held out my hand. She gave me the letter. For one long moment I stood listening to my labored breathing and then I sat down, opened the envelope, and stepped right onto the roller coaster that swooped back into the past.

  VI

  I read the letter. Afterward it was so hard to know what to say. I knew in my mind how I felt, but it was so hard to find the words to express myself. Since I’m not an intellectual, I don’t have that intellectual trick of dealing in metaphysical abstractions as if they were concrete facts. The language of philosophy is foreign to me, and although I can talk of morality as fluently as any man who has had a religious upbringing, it occurred to me now that that language too was foreign to me, my fluency learned parrot fashion and useless in any intellectual argument. Anyway, I had always distrusted intellectual arguments. They only clouded one’s view of reality. It was far more practical to see a situation in stark black and white without any colors that could confuse the issue. One made better decisions that way. And of course, to get on in life and be a success, one had to make good decisions.

  But now someone else was using my technique against me. Tony Sullivan was seeing the past in black and white, but his blacks were my whites, and his whites were my blacks, so his view of the past was the opposite of mine. I wanted to say that to the girl before me, but I knew that wouldn’t be sufficient comment; I had to persuade her that Tony’s landscape, with its absence of color, even of grays and off-whites, was no more valid than my own stylized view of the past which had sustained me for so long, but truth was such an abstract subject and I was incapable of saying what I wanted to say.

  I suddenly thought of Kevin remarking when we were discussing why people hid behind masks: “I think it’s because life’s so fantastically complicated.”

  “Life’s so complicated,” I said at last, “so confusing. Everyone sees the truth differently. The truth is different things to different people. Eyewitnesses can give different stories of the same set of facts. I respect Tony’s view, since he’s obviously so sincere, but what he says in this letter just isn’t the whole story.”

  “Oh?” said the girl bitterly. “Do you deny that you were so obsessed with power that you did everything you could to smash my father’s career and ruin my mother’s life?”

  I was careful not to snap back a brutal reply. Instead I thought hard and struggled again for the right words, for the words which came closest to reflecting the truth. “I don’t believe,” I said slowly at last, “I was any more obsessed with power than your father was. But perhaps the truth was that it was more necessary to me than it was to him. He was a big tough guy with an attractive personality, and he didn’t really need power, he just enjoyed it. He had other ways of making people notice him, you see. Power wasn’t his sole means of communication.”

  “Communication?” She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Perhaps I had. I wished again I could express all these abstract ideas better. I wished there were some hard facts I could use, but there was only the truth, slippery and shadowy, and my knowledge that for once I had to confront it instead of retreating behind a shield of comforting clichés. I thought of those clichés—“I did what I had to do,” “I was more sinned against than sinning,” “I considered it my moral duty”—and the familiar phrases, usually so comforting, echoed emptily through my consciousness. Suddenly I felt very, very tired. I wanted so intensely to withdraw into my familiar black-and-white world, but there was the letter, my black-and-white world turned inside out against me, the accusations filling line after line after line.

  “Cornelius forced Dad out of Van Zale’s, but that wasn’t enough … hounded him … tried to smash his new business … rumors about Dad’s drinking fostered on both sides of the Atlantic … Sam Keller forged a photograph … Dad knew he was ruined … driving … empty road … even then Cornelius wouldn’t let Dinah alone … persecuted her … but she fooled
him … she won …”

  She won.

  “Please go now,” I said to Elfrida.

  “But is there nothing more you can say?” she said in a shaking voice. “Nothing?”

  “What more can possibly be said? I could spend about five hours telling you my life story and trying to explain why I acted as I did, but what’s the point? You’re not truly interested in me or even in the whole truth about what happened back in the thirties. You’re interested primarily in yourself. You’re trying to anesthetize the pain you feel about your parents’ deaths by blaming someone, and of course I’m tailor-made for the role. Okay, go ahead. Blame me. I don’t pretend to be a saint. I don’t pretend I haven’t done things I’ve later regretted, and I don’t pretend I haven’t made mistakes. But does that make me a monster? No, it damn well does not. It makes me a human being, and maybe when you’re a little older and a whole lot wiser and more tolerant, you’ll have some glimmer of the hell your father put me through time after time with his sneers and his jeers and his … But no, I’m not going to say any more. I’m going to stop right there. Nothing I say now can alter the past, so why discuss it? The past is over, the past is done.”

  “But we all have to live with it,” said Elfrida. “The past is never over. The past is present.”

  “That statement has no reality,” I said, speaking too loudly. I supposed I was very upset. My chest was hurting. I knew I was going to be ill. “That statement is an intellectual delusion. That statement,” I said, “that statement … is not … acceptable … not acceptable to me either now … or at any other time.”

  I left her. I had to. I somehow got to the nearest bathroom, where I sat down on the edge of the bath. I was gasping for breath, fighting and sweating for it, but I kept calm and bent my whole will toward subjugating the suffocating pressure in my chest. For a while I thought I was going to be all right. My breathing became more regular and the pain eased. Eventually I found I could move. Using the towel rail, I groped my way to my feet, paused for a moment to make sure there was no relapse, and then very slowly eased myself back into the sitting room.