“Oh, God,” I said as my knees threatened to buckle. I wished I had refused the second martini. “Oh, Lord.”
“Oh, and these are for you, too, Miss Slade,” smirked the desk clerk, and from beneath the counter he produced a sheaf of red roses.
“Oh, no!” To my despair I saw there was a card. Knowing my only hope was to tear it up unread, I ripped it open without hesitation.
“Da mi basia mille …”
I was quite unable to cope with all the numerous kisses the poet had demanded from his Lesbia, and stumbling into my flat, I shoved the roses into water and collapsed on the sofa. I did try tearing up the card, but it made no difference. By that time my longing had become unbearable, and after saying “Oh hell!” very loudly three times, I changed into a crepe-de-chine frock, set my Milan hat at its jauntiest angle and with a sinking heart set off to the Plaza.
V
They were all sitting around a table in the suite, and Alan and Paul were swapping nursery rhymes. Alan, covered in chocolate from ear to ear, was sitting on Paul’s knee, while Mary was sitting pink-cheeked and upright in front of an empty glass of champagne. The fourth member of the party, the bodyguard Peterson, was lifting the bottle of champagne out of the ice bucket to offer her a refill. Mary liked Peterson. I saw them eye each other approvingly as Alan piped, “ ‘Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie, kissed the girls and made them cry!’ ”
“Detestable Georgie Porgie!” I said. “Brute, monster and sadist!”
“ ‘There was a little girl,’ ” said Paul unperturbed, “ ‘who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very, very good, but when she was bad—’ ”
“ ‘—she was horrid!’ ” squeaked Alan triumphantly.
Peterson rose to his feet. “Miss Oakes, can I take you and Master Alan for a stroll in the park?”
Mary went pinker than ever and said she was sure that was very kind of, him. Alan was detached from Paul, mopped with a napkin and led away chanting “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play.”
The door closed. Paul’s eyes began to sparkle. “From Catullus to nursery rhymes!” he said laughing. “What a long way we’ve come in four years!”
I managed to say, “I’m going back to England, Paul.”
“My dear, of course you are! And what right have I to dissuade you? After all, you’re not my wife! I can’t give you orders or expect you to accede meekly to my wishes. But before you rush back to England let’s at least drink a little champagne together and toast your departure in style.”
“I’m not going to bed with you, you know.”
“Of course not.” He flicked some crumbs away elegantly with his napkin, stood up and slipped his arms around my waist.
“I don’t care how many red roses you send. I don’t care how many reams of Catullus you quote. So long as you’re living with another woman I can have nothing more to do with you. It’s a matter of principle.”
“I absolutely believe in matters of principle,” said Paul, guiding me gently towards the bedroom.
“If you think I’m just another feeble female incapable of saying no to you …”
“A wilted Victorian heroine? Not quite your style, my dear!”
“Well, dash it, Paul, what do you expect of me?” I shouted frenziedly as he closed the bedroom door and started to unbutton my frock. “I’m jolly well not going to let you have your beastly cake and eat it! Why should you live with us both at once?”
“I don’t want to live with you both at once.”
“Then just what do you want?”
“I want to see Mallingham again someday,” he said, drawing us down together onto the bed. “I want to see the sun shining on the deserted beach at Waxham and to feel the wind blowing over the reeds of Horsey Mere and to sail across Mallingham Broad to the most perfect house on earth.”
Tears streamed down my face.
“Ah, Dinah!” he exclaimed with all his most passionate and romantic enthusiasm. “Can’t you understand how often I dream of going back? Sylvia must come first with me now, just as you came first in 1922, but when the opportunity comes to me again do you really think I could ever turn my back on another chance to travel sideways in time?”
“But, Paul, you’re simply not facing reality—it’ll never work out and we’ll all be the losers!”
“This is the only reality I care about right now,” he said, pulling me to him.
“But I’m losing, losing, losing …”
“No,” he said. “You’ve won, Dinah. You’ve won.” And then as his flesh slid smoothly against mine I forgot all my compromised principles in the ecstasy of my Pyrrhic victory.
Five
I
SOMETIME AT THE END of the afternoon I said to Paul, “I shall still go home at the end of June, you know,” and when he answered, “I know you’ll have to go someday and I accept that,” I wondered if he meant what he said any more than I did. We may have believed intellectually in what we said but emotionally we believed something else. The sane logical side of my mind told me that he had promised nothing, yet despite this I was wholeheartedly convinced he would return to Mallingham for an extended visit. The specter of Sylvia receded. The sane logical side of my mind still told me he would never leave her, but now I no longer listened, because I was once more convinced that when he returned to Mallingham he would never be able to tear himself away. Like Paul I had lost touch with reality, and just as he believed in all honesty that he could repay his debt to Sylvia while still being fair to me, so I told myself once again that Sylvia was of no significance, a woman who as little more than an unpaid social secretary could not hope to hold Paul for much longer.
April slipped into May. In England the shadow of a general strike towered on the horizon, and my friends were writing me long memos about the firm’s plans to cope once the disruption began. The crisis seemed immensely distant, particularly since the American newspapers were obsessed only with the gory details of the Hall-Mills murder case and the trivial antics of Mr. Browning and his fifteen-year-old bride, Peaches. In fact sometimes I even wondered if the continent of Europe still existed, for few Americans bothered to peer across the Atlantic Ocean. Their myopic gaze reached no further than Wall Street, and in the shadowed streets of lower Manhattan every public utterance from the bankers assumed the divine force of an oracle.
Paul was very busy. When I encouraged him to talk about his work I heard about the rising star of the investment trusts, of fifty-million-dollar bond issues floated by a casual stroke of the pen, of a voracious public gobbling up anything from debentures to common stock, of the “spread,” the “gravy,” the “bucket shops” and the “pools.”
“I made a million dollars today,” Paul once remarked. “Half a million in commission on two separate deals. My clients are happy, the investing public’s happy and I’m happy—what a wonderful invention capitalism is!” And when I reminded him of America’s Kraken he only laughed and said, “Après moi le déluge!”
Later he offered me money to play the market, and unable to resist the temptation I accepted it. He told me what to buy, I did as I was told, and within a month I had doubled my money and paid him back.
In my spare moments I spent much time on Fifth Avenue investigating mÿ competitors. Using a pseudonym, I patronized the salons of Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein and was proud to discover that Diana Slade of Mayfair could match them in opulent surroundings. Cedric would have got on well with Miss Arden, whose premises shimmered with pastel colors, but I preferred Madame Rubinstein’s dramatic dark-blue walls. Since the two tycoons copied each other in as cutthroat a fashion as possible, I found little difference in their products, but I bought every jar and bottle I could find and sent them off to England to be analyzed.
Eyeing the mass market I also discovered that huge corporations such as Pond’s and Colgate were trying to compete for the small but lucrative market belonging to Arden and Rubinstein, and I made notes on their techniq
ues to break the monopoly. Pond’s advertising was especially effective, a series of endorsements by leading social figures, with the advertisements taking a full page in all the leading women’s magazines. “How unfortunate that this technique is unavailable to us in England!” I wrote wryly to Harriet. “Can you imagine Lady Uppingham’s face if we asked her to endorse our lipstick in the press?” Yet not all the American marketing tricks were unsuitable for English use, and soon I had collected a file of slick advertisements and slicker packaging designs.
When Paul offered me the services of one of the Van Zale research analysts I discovered that American women were spending an estimated six million dollars a day on beauty products, and that even in the mass market, calculated at ninety-seven percent of the female population, the average woman spent one hundred and fifty dollars a year on cosmetics. An indiscreet masseuse at the Elizabeth Arden salon told me that the Arden clients, drawn from the remaining three percent, thought nothing of spending a hundred and fifty dollars a week to ensure their beauty. With my mind in a whirl at the thought of all this money cascading from feminine handbags in search of the ideal cosmetics, I could hardly restrain myself from opening a New York salon, but Paul, like Hal Beecher, advised me to spend more time conquering the British market.
Unless Paul was away on business I saw him at least three times a week. Usually we preferred to dine in the privacy of our Plaza suite, but sometimes we would go to the theater and pause afterwards at Montmartre, a restaurant at Broadway and Fifty-second Street where the supper dishes were delicious and the music was soothing. I knew it was useless expecting him to take me to nightclubs, but I was surprised when he shied away too from the cinema. He said the flickering screen reminded him of various visual disturbances he had suffered in the past, and although I told him that modern films were much easier on the eyes he still refused to be tempted.
As if to compensate me for our old-fashioned evenings he began to see me at weekends. We motored up the Hudson Valley and picnicked by the river; we sailed in his yacht along the Connecticut shore; we crossed to New Jersey by private launch and walked along the winding paths beneath the Palisades. As the weather became warmer he talked of finding a retreat so that Alan could enjoy a summer by the sea, and at the end of May he announced that he had arranged for me to have the guest cottage on Steven Sullivan’s estate at Great Neck.
“It’ll be fun for Alan to play with the Sullivan boys,” he said, “and he’ll probably enjoy himself more there than he does in the city.”
So we moved to the little house above the beach on Long Island Sound, and three times a week I went to the city to meet Paul at the Plaza.
England had staggered through eleven days of a general strike without dissolving into revolution, but that crisis seemed further away than ever and now I, like the rest of America, preferred to read only about the disappearance of Aimée Semple McPherson and the sensuous upward swing of the stock market. Although I continued to respond conscientiously to my friends’ communiqués from London, their problems had become unreal to me, and at last I began to understand the psychological state Paul had sought to describe when he had talked of traveling sideways in time.
“It’s like being dead,” I said to Paul. “England’s going on as usual, but I’m not there. I can only peer across from my parallel furrow of time and try to see what’s happening.”
Being by the sea heightened the sense of illusion. I would wake in the morning, gaze at the waters of the Sound bathed in that fierce foreign light and imagine myself in a dream. It was only when I overheard the gardeners discussing the stock market that I was aware of the steady drumbeat of reality, and then in my mind’s eye I saw not the clouds scudding across the Broadland of Norfolk but the sun beating steamily on the canyons of Willow and Wall.
When the Sullivans made efforts to draw me into their set Paul subtly sought to prevent them, for reasons which he never explained but which I assumed arose from his desire to ensure that Sylvia and I never met. I raised no objection. I certainly wanted no repeat of that disastrous evening when I had seen Sylvia, and accordingly I found that my social life revolved not around the Sullivans but around the Claytons in their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Whenever I was due to meet Paul in the evening I would have lunch with Grace; if I met Paul for lunch I usually stayed on in Manhattan to spend the evening with the Claytons. Having made a pact not to talk about Paul, Bruce and I soon found there was no friction between us, and although Grace could be tiresome on the subject of emancipation she was so interesting on French literature that I found it easy to overlook her one blind spot. I enjoyed meeting the professors, students, artists and bohemians who filtered continuously through the Claytons’ apartment. The conversation was stimulating, the atmosphere relaxed, and Bruce’s intellectual rhetoric brought back all my happiest memories of Cambridge, when I had worn myself out debating the doctrines of Nietzsche and Marx with my intensely earnest fellow bluestockings.
Somehow it was more fun discussing them with Bruce. Most intellectuals who fall into the trap of political idealism can usually be made to look idiotic, but Bruce combined an awe-inspiring intellectual range with considerable oratorical skill. His views might be both extreme and unpractical, but it was exceedingly difficult to make them look ridiculous. His main theme was that capitalism should be abolished—a theme which should have seemed utterly absurd in New York at that time, but somehow when Bruce said that the big roulette wheel of Wall Street was a social evil and that the bankers who oiled that wheel were a menace to society, all my doubts about the morality of capitalism were awakened from hibernation.
By the time I met him Bruce already regarded himself as the lone voice crying in the wilderness against the evils of capitalism, and the more the wealth gushed into Wall Street that summer the more strident his lone voice became. In early May he founded a society called the Citizens for Militant Socialism, and on Sundays they would make speeches in Union Square to the sardonic crowds who came to listen.
“I do wish Bruce wouldn’t dabble with that sort of society,” Grace confided to me anxiously in June. “It does so attract the lunatic element, and yet Bruce refuses to admit that. What do you think I ought to do? Think how awful it would be if he got arrested! How on earth would I break the news to Elizabeth?”
“I don’t see any harm in them meeting here once a week and saying ‘Hail Lenin’ to one another, but I do think Bruce should get rid of that awful man Krasnov. It’s not just that I think he’s schizophrenic. I don’t even think he’s a Trotskyite. He’s more like a disciple of Stalin.”
“But he’s the only genuine Russian we’ve got!” said Grace distractedly, and bewailed the fact that all the Russian emigrés in New York seemed to be royalists.
“How’s Bruce’s society going—the Citizens for Militant Socialism?” asked Paul, taking me by surprise one Saturday afternoon as we sunbathed on the Sullivans’ private beach. “Are you a member?”
“God, no! It’s far too eccentric for me, thank you very much! How did you find out about it?”
“I employ people whose business it is to find out such things. So you think Bruce has become eccentric?”
“Well, I know Grace is worried about him.”
“That’s a pity,” said Paul shortly. “I thought he’d quieten down once Greg Da Costa had returned to Mexico.”
I had told Paul of my meeting with Greg Da Costa, but he had already known about it. He had Da Costa watched and the detective had seen me leave Terence’s apartment.
“Da Costa made quite an impression on me,” I said after a moment. “I don’t think I’d expected him to be quite such a … what’s the American word which describes him?”
“I know how I’d describe him,” said Paul. “I’d say he was a peculiarly depressing example of how an aristocratic American family can hit rock bottom in one generation. A rotter, as you English would say so succinctly.”
“I hated the way he talked as though you owed him a
living. Paul, he isn’t blackmailing you, is he? I know you said you felt obliged to help the Da Costa brothers financially because they had once been Vicky’s stepsons and you were so upset about Jay’s suicide, but—”
“I should have known better than to be so sentimental. Let that be a lesson to you, my dear! If you ever meet a sponger like Da Costa, clamp down on your charitable instincts and never show him the color of your money!” He paused, still smiling, but when I only shivered he added abruptly, “Don’t worry about Greg. I know very well how he feels about me, but he’s the least of my problems. You won’t find Greg Da Costa seriously meddling with the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Alan was staggering up the beach towards us with his bucket full of water.
“And Bruce Clayton?” said my voice in a rush.
“All talk and no action, like all the best intellectuals. My only fear about Bruce is that he’ll do something politically stupid and ruin his very promising academic career. Ah, here comes Miss Oakes with the lemonade. Let’s leave her in charge of Alan for a few minutes, Dinah, and take a stroll along the shore. There’s something I want to discuss with you.”
I paused for some lemonade, but when my glass was empty I slipped my hand into his and we set off along the sand. The waves of the Sound thudded peacefully on the deserted beach. The afternoon was hot and hazy.
“It’s about my will,” said Paul suddenly. “I’ve just given my lawyer instructions to revise it.”
“Oh, Lord!” I said nervously. “What does that mean?”
He laughed. “Relax—I solemnly promise not to leave you a cent! But I want to settle a small sum on Alan, Dinah, not enough to spoil him but enough to make him aware that I …” He paused for the right phrase but could not find it Finally he continued, “However, I don’t want to make this settlement in my will. I have this strong conviction that Alan would be better off growing up in anonymity, and my will is sure to be well-publicized. I’d rather settle the money on him while I’m still alive.”
The Rich Are Different Page 37
