The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  “This is the end of our affair,” I said at last.

  “I don’t care!” she cried, but her lip trembled.

  I saw my chance and took it. It was a dirty chance, like hitting a man below the belt, but by that time I was so desperate I could hardly afford to be chivalrous.

  “It’s also the end of our business relationship,” I said shortly. “I don’t accept pregnant women for clients.”

  She rushed up to me, her eyes glittering, her face crimson with rage, and before I realized what was happening she had slapped me hard on each cheek.

  “You bastard!” she screamed at me. “You swore to me that whatever happened between us in private our business relationship would be unaffected! How dare you make such promises when you had no intention of keeping them!”

  She rushed out of the room without giving me a chance to reply, but I dashed after her. My face was still tingling with the marks of her hands and I was conscious of the most extraordinary mixture of emotions jostling for front place in my mind. To say I felt confused would hardly begin to convey my rage, guilt, mortification, affronted pride, battered honesty and dire suspicion that she had been justified in hitting me.

  We raced up to her bedroom. She tried to slam the door in my face, but I shoved my way in and caught her as she tripped and fell.

  “Dinah—”

  “You brute, get out of my house!”

  “It’s mine,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Oh, you—you—you—”

  Words failed her. I started to make love to her on the threadbare Indian carpet.

  “Paul, don’t … please … I love you so much. … If you’re going to go away, for God’s sake go now and don’t put me through any more—”

  “No one’s putting you through anything. You’re setting out along the road to disaster all by yourself and it seems there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”

  We made love. After we had crawled onto the bed to recover she said in a small voice, “Do you accept my decision, then?”

  “No,” I said. “I deplore it. But I’m beginning to accept the fact that I can’t alter it.”

  “If you could give me just one good reason why I shouldn’t have the baby …” Her voice trailed away.

  There was a long silence. I realized this was my last chance, but all I could say was, “I’ve stated my reasons at length. My daughter—”

  “It must have been terrible for you that she died in childbirth, but Paul, I don’t have Vicky’s medical history and I’m strong as an ox!”

  I was silent. The seconds ticked by. We were very close, she lying on her side and propped up on her elbow, I sprawled against the pillows.

  “What is it, Paul? Is there something else? Something you haven’t told me?”

  I thought of the pity in Elizabeth’s eyes and felt cold. At last I said slowly, “When I married Sylvia I promised her that any child I had would be hers. I never promised her fidelity, but I did promise her that and I like to think that when I make a promise I keep it.”

  “But if she can’t have children, doesn’t that revoke your promise?”

  “I don’t want children.”

  “If that’s true, why did you ever trust me to practice birth control when I told you frankly I saw nothing wrong in having an illegitimate child?”

  Silence fell again. With shock I realized that my throat was aching with useless emotion, and I at once stood up and walked away.

  I went down the passage to the bedroom where my valet and I both pretended I slept each night, and sat on the edge of the bed. Later Dinah came to sit beside me and slip her arm through mine.

  “You do want it, don’t you, Paul?”

  “I can’t concede that,” I said, not looking at her, “but I do concede that I’m fully responsible for what’s happened. For my wife’s sake I can’t acknowledge the child officially, but if you wish I’ll send you money for his support.”

  “There’s no need for that if you support my efforts to start my business.”

  “You know I will. I’m sorry I threatened you like that; it was unworthy of me. As I’ve already said, I like to keep my promises.”

  She kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Promise me you’ll come back to Mallingham, Paul. I know you’ll have to return to New York eventually, but promise me that when you go you won’t forget all about me.”

  “To forget would be a mental impossibility!”

  We kissed with increasing passion for some minutes. At last I made myself say, “I’m glad you still realize that I’ll someday have to go back to New York.”

  “Someday. Yes.”

  “I’ll never leave my wife, Dinah.”

  “I accept that.”

  I immediately wanted to leave my wife and never return to New York again. After allowing myself a smile at the contrariness of human nature, I seriously wondered for the first time where my seductive journey sideways in time was leading me.

  That night I lay awake considering my position. It seemed that I had two possible courses of action: either I could cut off the affair immediately and return to America before matters got any further out of hand or I could go on, indulging myself to the hilt on the assumption that any fiery love affair was bound to burn itself out within six months. On the whole I favored the second option. To leave now would be exceedingly painful for both of us and might even result in the prolongation of a relationship which would otherwise have died a natural death, but if I went on we would have our pleasure, achieve the appropriate degree of satiation and part peacefully, still the best of friends. I tried to estimate when we would reach the point of satiation. September? We would have known each other three months by that time, and I seldom wished to extend an affair longer than that. However, Dinah was an exceptional girl. I extended the affair till October. Apart from natural satiation the baby would be muting our relationship by that time, for she would be uninterested in intercourse and I would be uninterested in her figure. I have never been one of those men who find pregnant women irresistibly erotic.

  The next morning I said to her, “I want to spend the rest of my stay in England at Mallingham. I’m going to turn Milk Street over lock, stock and barrel to Hal Beecher, cut myself off from society and take the long vacation I’ve been promising myself for years. Can you put up with me till the end of September?”

  “Monster!” said Dinah, hugging me. “And to think that only yesterday I was wondering how I put up with you at all!”

  “I suppose I should offer to take you on a grand tour of Greece and Italy, but—”

  “Quite unnecessary,” said Dinah happily, “I’d much rather stay at Mallingham and build my nest. Anyway the political situation in Greece looks awful. If the British Army is going to fight the Turks there I for one want to be as far from Greece as possible.”

  So it was settled. I instructed O’Reilly to get rid of the Curzon Street house, pay off Miss Phelps and sell the Rolls-Royce; I decided to keep the Lanchester Forty. Then after a final meeting with Hal at Milk Street I abandoned him to his fate and cabled New York to let them know I was going on vacation. I even sent a separate cable to Steve Sullivan to say no one was to communicate with me on any business matter unless there was a disaster equal to the financial panic of 1907.

  After that all I had to do was write to my wife.

  I tore up six drafts before I wrote:

  MY DEAREST SYLVIA:

  I have taken this sudden decision to have a long vacation in England because I believe it will ultimately be the best for both of us. I apologize in advance for the embarrassment my continuing absence will undoubtedly cause you, but must ask you to trust me to do what is right. I miss you and think of you often, but this vacation is something I have to do.

  All my love,

  PAUL

  I paused, fidgeting with my pen, and then added:

  P.S. If anyone should ask you if I have permanently emigrated to England you can tell them I have given you my word that I shall return.
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  I looked down at my promise, resplendent in black and white. For one long moment I hesitated, but then I slipped the folded paper into an envelope, sealed the flap and sent the letter on its way across the ocean.

  II

  I remember the strong cool sunshine of an English August, and the fine soft English rain which cloaked the Broads in mist. I remember the light of long evenings and the windmill sails turning slowly against huge golden skies and the brown dots of cattle grazing on the windswept farmland. I remember the miles of lonely sandhills and the oak woods bleached by salt floods and the lost ancient churches drowsing in a wild forgotten landscape. I remember that summer of all summers, the parting of still waters beneath the prow of our yacht, the cry of the redshank, the boom of the bittern, the flash of trout in bright waters, the gleam of wild geese and the thunder of wild fowl on the wing. I remember rising at dawn and seeing the light changing on the dark meres and secret waterways, watching the movements of the bullrushes and reedmace, the swaying of the marsh grasses as the birds began to stir. And at night the mists would swirl up from the marshes and drift through the dikes and Dinah would talk of the eynds, the water ghosts of the far-off days when the mystery of that land had been unpenetrated for centuries by the outside world.

  I remember the jostling crowds at Wroxham and Horning, the roar of the motor boats, the screams of the raucous vacationers, the soiled waters, the litter in the reeds. I remember going under the low bridge at Potter Heigham and having half the village yelling navigational advice. And I remember sailing through the throngs of small boats up Breydon Water to the modern sprawl of a town which had once been a quiet fishing village, Great Yarmouth by the sea.

  But best of all I remember escaping from those parts of Broadland which the twentieth century had discovered. I remember the hidden private broads like Mallingham far from the blare of the phonographs and the offensive young flappers and lounge-lizards in their London clothes. I remember all the isolated splendor of the Brograve Level, and I remember the gleaming fastnesses of reed and swamp, the timelessness of undiscovered villages and the walled magnificence of Mallingham Hall.

  “It’ll be better still in October,” Dinah said to me. “The holiday crowds go back to London and Birmingham, the pleasure cruisers are moored for the winter and Broadland goes back to the marshmen again. The eel nets are set across the rivers, and the long guns for duck shooting are taken down from their thongs on the farmhouse walls and the woodcock come down from Scandinavia and the wind starts to blow across the North Sea. Oh, and you should see the reed beds! The golds and the reds and the rusts—it’s all so beautiful, so unmarked, so unspoiled, and when the wind starts to blow, the cattle gallop in exultation and the wild geese fly in from the coast at dusk and all the while the eels are running to the sea. …”

  I stayed on into October.

  At the beginning of August I had bought a twenty-two-foot yacht. It had a plain little cabin where we could sleep, cook and eat, and for the remainder of that magic summer we divided our time between relaxing at Mallingham and embarking on long unhurried expeditions by water to comb the Broads from end to end. Peterson worried about my safety and wanted with admirable loyalty but total lack of romantic imagination to follow us in a motorboat, but I refused to allow it. Dinah and I spent our voyages alone together and lived with a simplicity I had forgotten could exist, while my employees were left to vegetate at Mallingham Hall. I knew they were all miserable, but it was so impossible for me to share their homesickness for the city lights that I found it hard to sympathize with them. My valet Dawson tried to conceal his boredom as he tended my clothes with scrupulous care, Peterson read every novel Edgar Wallace had ever written, and O’Reilly, whose sole tasks were to telephone Milk Street once a day from Norwich and buy anything that I might require, amused himself by rereading the plays of Ibsen. Despite his Irish name O’Reilly was half Swedish and had long been drawn to Nordic literature.

  Naturally all of them thought I was eccentric, but theirs, as Tennyson wrote of the Light Brigade, was not to reason why. I was indulgent with them, but although they were polite in return I occasionally caught their looks of despair whenever they thought my back was turned.

  I finally gave Dinah not only the Mallingham Hours (recently purchased at the inevitable sale) but also the volume of Tennyson which I had bought her as a farewell gift. However, since I had again canceled my passage to New York I was able to enjoy the task of selecting a dedication for the flyleaf. At first I thought I would quote a couple of romantic lines from Oenone, but then I remembered I had decided to buy her the book after we had discussed the idealism of The Revenge. Finding the poem, I read again about the heroism of Sir Richard Grenville, who with his little English ship “The Revenge” had fought fifty-three Spanish galleons single-handed, and by the time I reached Sir Richard’s final exhortation to his men I was awash with all the emotions which the War had made so unfashionable.

  Seizing my pen, I found the lines which seemed to mark the high-water mark of the poem’s romantic idealism and copied the words which Tennyson had put into Sir Richard’s mouth:

  “Sink me the ship, Master Gunner! Sink her—split her in twain! Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!”

  I sighed with nostalgic pleasure, and having completed the couplet I wrote underneath: “From a realist who aspires to be a romantic to a romantic who aspires to be a realist—or should it be vice versa? In profoundly grateful memory of the summer of ’22. PAUL.”

  “Dreadful Victorian sentimentality!” said Dinah with a shudder, but she refused to be parted from the book. She even took it to bed with her and would read the most flesh-crawling episodes of Maud aloud to me by candlelight. “Tennyson will always remind me of you,” she said when I managed to wrest the book from her hands.

  I knew it upset her that I could never bring myself to refer to the child, so I made a special effort and said with a smile, “I give you full permission to call our daughter after Tennyson’s most enigmatic femme fatale!”

  “Maud?”

  “Who else?”

  “Supposing it’s a boy!”

  But I dared not think of that. The only way I could face thinking about the child was to imagine it as a little replica of Vicky, pink and white, flawlessly healthy.

  “Paul, if it’s a boy I want to call him Alan—after the first recorded owner of Mallingham, William the Conqueror’s henchman, Alan of Richmond. Do you approve?”

  I nodded. It was too hard to speak. Presently she herself changed the subject and I was able to close my mind against the memory of Vicky’s infant brother suffering long ago in that second apartment I had shared with Dolly.

  The days drifted past. Sometimes I thought they would go on drifting by indefinitely, but at last in early November we came back from a day’s duck shooting to find that our world had been invaded and our peace destroyed.

  We had moored the punt and left old Tom Stokeby the marshman to tend to the ducks and the guns. It was a gray day and the wind was blowing across the marshes from the sea. We were halfway across the lawn to the house when Dinah glanced up onto the terrace and stopped dead.

  I stopped too, and following her glance I saw that O’Reilly had stepped out to meet us. Directly behind him was my partner in London Hal Beecher, and at once I saw the end of my cherished furrow in time. Taking Dinah’s hand in mine, I walked on with her up to the terrace.

  “Paul, do forgive me for intruding like this. Good afternoon, Miss Slade.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Beecher,” said Dinah.

  I said nothing. We all went inside.

  Dinah said in a rush, “Perhaps some tea … I’ll go and talk to Mrs. Oakes.”

  O’Reilly and Hal had a race to see who could open the door for her. Hal won. The door opened and closed. Dinah’s footsteps retreated into the distance, and suddenly the stench of New York was so strong that I wanted to run after her.

  “Yes?” I said politely to Hal.


  There was an awkward pause before Hal said in a low voice, “It’s Stewart and Greg Da Costa. I’m afraid Jay’s boys are after your blood, Paul.” And as I held out my hand without a word he gave me the cable which had arrived that morning from my partner Steven Sullivan in New York.

  III

  “Well make you pay,” young Gregory Da Costa had said to me at his father’s funeral earlier that year.

  I had not wanted to go to the funeral, but I had had no choice. It would have looked suspicious if I had stayed away, but no murderer could have felt more haunted by his crime than I had felt when I had stepped into the church that afternoon, and no retribution could have been more terrible to me than the specter of my shattered health. It was odd to think that Jay’s death had taken me completely by surprise. It had made me realize how imperfectly I had known him. My one persistent thought throughout the funeral had been how greatly upset Vicky would have been if she had lived, but if Vicky had lived I would never have meddled in the affairs of Mr. Roberto Salzedo of the Mortgage Bank of the Andes.

  It was after Vicky’s death that Sylvia and I had spent our two years in Europe. I had felt unable to work alongside Jay any longer, and the War gave me the necessary excuse to take over the firm’s affairs in London. Capital was badly needed in England, and our house was heavily involved in war loans.

  I returned to America in 1919.

  He had remarried by that time, of course—another young girl like Vicky, but not so pretty. He was cordial to me and I was cordial to him, but I found it hard to estimate the thoughts which were passing through his head and I doubt if he had any idea of the kind of thoughts which were passing through mine.

  I was infinitely patient because I knew I could afford no mistakes. One cannot move against a man like Jason Da Costa without risking one’s neck, and I did not want to erect the scaffold only to find the noose slipping over my own head.

  It took me another two years to assemble my materials for the scaffold, but in 1921 I at last had the chance to start building it. Huge selling syndicates were then the fashion in investment banking, and the pace of business had increased to such an extent that large flotations would sometimes be launched and disposed of within twenty-four hours. The burden on the members of the originating syndicate was therefore much heavier, for since there was no time for the selling syndicate to inquire into the caliber of the flotation, they had to trust that the originating syndicate had made the proper investigations and that the securities offered for distribution were a sound investment. Naturally, all the front-rank houses could be expected to conduct proper investigations into their clients’ affairs, but mistakes were inevitably made and in such cases the selling syndicates stood to lose face with their customers; no one likes to be confronted with an irate customer who has lost his money.