It was so peaceful in the garden. Far away Alan was chattering to Mary, but I could not hear what he said. I wanted to look Elizabeth straight in the eye but it was too difficult, so I looked instead at the hazy sky, the parched trees and the scorched coarse grass of the lawn.
“Of course, since you’re so honest with each other, he would have told you all about the illness which runs in his family.”
I could not speak.
“The cruelest part of the whole business,” said Elizabeth, sipping her tea, “is that he should have relapsed after more than thirty years of perfect health. I know he was very ill as a child, but he did recover and lead a normal life. It was only after Vicky died … But of course he would have told you all about that.”
“Of course,” I whispered. “Of course.”
“During this past year his deterioration was really most severe. Thank God you were able to help him back to health, Miss Slade! It really gave Paul a new lease on life, didn’t it, when Sylvia suggested he bring you over from England.”
At first I thought I must have misheard her. Again I was beyond speech, and as I stared at her dumbly the shadowy figure of Sylvia seemed to move forward into the light.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” said Elizabeth surprised. “Yes, it was Sylvia who sent for you—I can’t really claim any credit, because I only gave her moral support. It was, as you can imagine, a very difficult decision for her to make, but she was the only one who could make it because Paul, loving her as he does, would never have sent for you without her consent. But you see, she was desperate. Paul was so ill, and nothing the doctors did seemed to work. I also got the impression— although naturally Sylvia is too well-bred to discuss private marital matters with anyone but her husband—that there were certain difficulties which Paul thought could only be resolved by someone such as yourself. … What a powerful attraction you and Paul have for each other, haven’t you, Miss Slade! Sylvia’s been concerned, I know, but I’ve always told her not to worry. I know Paul. He’s no fool. He’s well aware that his illness is going to return eventually, and he’s well aware that Sylvia is the one woman who’ll always stand by him. It’s so sad that the illness is incurable. In fact, there’s no denying it really is the most tragic fate,” mused Elizabeth Clayton, looking down the garden towards Alan, “to inherit epilepsy.”
We sat in silence for twenty seconds. Twenty seconds is a long silence where there has been a steady flow of conversation for more than an hour.
At the end of the garden Alan left the flower bed and rushed up to me. “Mummy, there’s a huge great butterfly down there!”
I looked at him, my beautiful little boy with his dark eyes shining in his small bright face, and the sickness started to churn in my stomach.
Elizabeth said, “Is he still there, Alan? Can you show him to me?” When she stood up, taking his hand in hers and leading him across the lawn, Alan forgot his shyness. I heard him chattering to her, but I never heard her reply because by that time I was indoors. Meeting the butler I asked for the cloakroom, and two minutes later I was being violently sick in a dark little room behind the stairs.
Six
I
AT FIRST I COULD only remember the small incidents: Bob Peterson’s horrified expression when Paul had said, “I’ll drive,” Paul’s distaste for the flickering screen of the cinema which reminded him of some vague unexplained visual disturbances, Bruce Clayton’s confident assumption “You know all about his illness, I guess,” Grace’s doubtful comment “Is that wise?” when I had talked of having another child. I remembered that epileptics were supposed to avoid alcohol— and I saw Paul’s countless untouched glasses of champagne. I remembered Paul saying, “Mens sana in corpore sano!”—and I saw him swinging his tennis racquet on the grass court at Mallingham.
Then the larger mysteries, all unsolved, began to billow back into my mind: Paul’s insistence that he wanted no children when it was obvious he felt the lack of children keenly, Terence O’Reilly’s determination to reassure me about Paul’s illness so that I would not ruin his plans to use me, Paul encouraging my inclination to avoid the Sullivan set and associate with people who either did not know him or who, like Bruce, would refuse to discuss him with me.
When there were no more incidents to resurrect I could shield myself no longer. I was face to face with Sylvia at last and forced to acknowledge how profoundly I had been deceived.
I had thought I understood their relationship, but I had understood nothing. In my arrogance I had continued to think of her as a weak, limited woman who had no identity beyond her married name and no existence except a life lived vicariously through her husband’s triumphs. But Sylvia had her own identity—I could see it taking shape before my eyes—and the identity had an independent will of its own. The woman who had manipulated my visit to America had been not weak but strong; I tried to imagine the inner resources needed for such a gesture but could not, for it was I who was limited, not she; I was the one trapped in Paul’s identity, abandoning my work in London to be at his beck and call in New York, imprisoned by my glib platitudes about free love and honest relationships. I had been deceived by others but first and foremost I had deceived myself, and in turning a blind eye to Paul’s evasiveness I had indulged myself in a relationship which was as much a fraudulent sham as the institution of marriage that I had long pretended to despise.
“Take me to the Plaza,” I said to Elizabeth’s chauffeur as we left Gramercy Park, and I added to Mary, “I want to stay the night in town but I’ll catch the train home tomorrow morning.”
As soon as I reached Paul’s suite I raided the cache of drink but found that Mayers had forgotten to replenish the supplies. After drinking half of the lone bottle of champagne I picked up the telephone with a steady hand.
“Grace?” I said a minute later. “Why did you never tell me Paul was an epileptic?”
“My God, Dinah, didn’t you know? I always assumed—”
“But you never once mentioned it!”
“Well, of course not! How could I? I mean, it’s just not the sort of thing one mentions, is it? After all, you were the one having an affair with him—I thought that if you wanted to discuss it you should be the one to bring up the subject.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. That was the tactful thing to do. That’s all right, Grace. It doesn’t matter.”
I rang off before she could ask more questions, drank another glass of champagne as if it were lemonade and then, summoning all my courage, placed a call to Paul’s house at Bar Harbor.
The butler told me Paul was playing tennis with his young protégés whom he had reunited for the summer, but as I was about to ring off he told me to wait. Paul had just walked into the hall.
“Dinah? How are you?”
For some reason the sound of his voice made me feel faint.
“Dinah? Hello—are you there?”
“Yes.” I swallowed with difficulty. “Paul, first let me apologize for breaking our agreement and phoning you like this.”
“Never mind, you picked a good time to call. Is something wrong?”
“No, just the usual monthly bore, but I don’t think I shall feel very sexy this weekend. I was going to suggest you postpone your visit to Manhattan until next week. Is that going to create difficulties for you?”
“Not at all. However, some cousins of Sylvia’s are arriving from San Francisco on Wednesday for a brief stay in New York before they sail to Europe, so I’ll have to be back in Manhattan by Tuesday at the latest. Why don’t we meet on Tuesday evening?”
“That would be lovely. Thanks, Paul. Sorry about the weekend.”
He said he would be looking forward to Tuesday evening. Before we said goodbye he sent his love to Alan. Finishing the bottle of champagne, I paddled my way drunkenly through the telephone directory and phoned Thomas Cook, the travel agents, to inquire about a passage to England.
II
The next morning I went to the New York Public Library on
Forty-second Street and read about epilepsy. I discovered that it was a diverse disease, that not all forms of epilepsy were hereditary, that the stigma attached to it was in most cases unjustified and arose through superstition and ignorance. I read that research was being conducted to find a drug which would eliminate seizures so that epileptics might lead normal lives; some doctors suspected that the hereditary form of the disease was caused by a recurring chemical imbalance in the brain, while others speculated that where the epilepsy seemed to be related to stress the brain might be the inherited weak point in the body through which mental stress was manifested in physical illness. There were instances of remissions; these were being studied with interest. I read of petit mal and grand mal and auras. I read of convulsions, blackouts and hallucinations. I read that for epilepsy there was as yet no known cure.
With a shudder I caught the train to Great Neck. Four days later on Tuesday evening I was back at the Plaza to meet Paul.
He arrived late but brought a bouquet of carnations and a box of my favorite chocolates.
“How are you?” he said, kissing me.
“I’m all right.”
He looked tanned, fit and youthful. Throughout dinner I was comparing his appearance with that of the haggard aging man who had welcomed me to New York that April.
We dined at the Marguery on Park Avenue, just as we had dined on my first evening in New York, and we had our same private corner with the same chairs cushioned in rose-and-ivory brocade. We chose the sole Marguery too, and again I marveled at those softly sparkling chains of light which reminded me of fountains frozen in some mysterious hiatus of time.
“Why did you particularly want to dine here tonight?” asked Paul when our fish was finished, and glancing at his glass of champagne I saw it was empty. That was when the evening took a different course from that evening in April, and I knew he had sensed my tension and was responding to it.
“I think perhaps I wanted to go backwards in time.”
“There’s no going back.”
“No.”
“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
“Yes, I’m afraid there is. I’ve decided I must go back to England, Paul. I’m awfully sorry, but Harriet and Cedric seem to be fighting worse than ever, and—”
He stopped me with a gesture. “Let’s go back to the Plaza. We can talk better there.”
“I’d rather talk about it here, Paul.”
He smiled at me so brilliantly that I could not quite identify the emotion at the back of his eyes.
“So the Plaza has become as inhibiting as my forgotten penthouse with the Angelica Kauffmann ceiling! Tell me, have you set the date for your return?”
“Yes, I have. I’m leaving tomorrow. The Mauretania sails at five in the afternoon.”
He was motionless for no more than three seconds before he shrugged his shoulders and gave me yet another careless brilliant smile. “You haven’t left me much time to talk you out of it!”
“I know. Paul, I’m terribly sorry to leave like this, but I feel a rapid departure would really be less painful.”
“Yes. Are you packed?”
“I’ve been packing since Friday and this morning I borrowed the Sullivans’ car and chauffeur to take the trunks to the pier.”
“What happened on Thursday?”
I stared at him. Something in my expression must have betrayed me, for he reached automatically for the bottle of champagne to refill his glass. But the bottle was empty, buried nose first in the bucket of ice.
With a gesture of annoyance he glanced around for the waiter but then changed his mind and put his napkin aside.
“Well, if this evening is to be a repeat of our first,” he remarked with all his most effortless urbanity, “let’s end as we began—in style at Willow and Wall!”
I knew I could not refuse. Panic pricked the nape of my neck as we left the restaurant.
This time neither Peterson nor the chauffeur was dismissed and we traveled downtown in silence, Paul and I sitting six inches apart on the back seat. I wanted to take his hand in mine, talk to him, cry, but I did nothing, said nothing and my eyes were tearless.
At the bank we left Peterson in the entrance hall with the night watchman and walked through the glittering main chamber to Paul’s office.
“Brandy, my dear?”
“Thanks. I wish I had the willpower to say no. I seem to have been drinking rather a lot lately.”
Evidently he had more willpower than I did, or perhaps he was merely afraid to drink more. Opening the bar concealed in the bookcase, he poured one glass of brandy and put the bottle away.
I had to sit down. There was a large chair on the other side of the desk, and I sank into it slowly as if I were falling in slow motion from a great height.
He sat down opposite me and we regarded each other, banker and client, across the desk which separated us.
Suddenly I said, “I love you, Paul,” and burst into tears.
He reached to take my hand. When I could speak again I said unsteadily, “Paul, I don’t want to leave you, I really don’t.”
“I don’t want you to go.” He was stroking the back of my hand with his index finger. “Stay until the fall and then we can go back to Mallingham together.”
I began to cry again, and when he saw I could not answer he said with great kindness, “Very well, let’s get to the bottom of this. God knows, I’m a businessman and I should hope I can always recognize an ultimatum when it’s staring me in the face! You’ve declared your intention of returning to England. Very well, that puts the ball squarely in my court I now have to make you an offer to induce you to stay.”
“Oh, no—no, it’s not like that—”
“But of course it is—and of course I’ll make you an offer! I don’t want you to go any more than you do, and in fact it’s very important to me that you stay. Well, what would you like? Name your terms! I’m quite prepared to give you anything you want so I can’t imagine there’ll be any difficulty.”
“Paul, what I want you can’t give me.”
I shall never know how I said those words. They were torn out of the most private reaches of my mind, and afterwards I felt in excruciating pain as if a limb had been hacked from my body.
“Ah!” he said at once with relief. “At last I’m beginning to understand! How slow I’ve been—and I always knew how much you wanted more children! Very well, if you think I’m a suitable candidate to help you with your dynastic schemes—”
He stopped.
I was mute.
Our private world came at last to an end.
For ten terrible seconds I saw him grow old before my eyes, and then he rose awkwardly to his feet, fumbled to open the bar and slopped brandy into a tumbler. I watched him drink it, watched him refill his glass.
Finally he was able to say, “All right, let’s discuss this calmly. I do understand the difficulty, but I’m sure there must be a solution. We have such a unique relationship. I can’t believe—” He stopped. His calmness disintegrated. In a low voice he said rapidly, “I feel so well when I’m with you. You give me such confidence. Even now I don’t mind your knowing. I always wondered if I’d mind, but now I can see it doesn’t make any difference, I just know I’ll stay well as long as you’re with me, I’m convinced of it. So you see you really mustn’t leave. If you leave I shall start slipping into that open grave again, and I can’t bear to think of it, can’t face it. It’s not death itself I mind but the gradual disintegration, the diminishing of my world by the steady loss of everything that’s important to me. I would have to abandon my work first, then my social activities, my friends—God, can’t you understand? It’s the living death that terrifies me. I dwell upon death a lot, often late at night when I can’t sleep, and all I can think is: when it comes, let it be quick! Let it be absolute! And then I remember my father, dying young at the height of his powers, and I envy him.” He stopped talking. The brandy glass was empty again. He was waiting for me
to speak.
But I did not know how to reply. In the end, wanting to show sympathy, I said falteringly, “You’re physically fit now, Paul. I think you exaggerate your dependence on me—your fears are all in your mind. Perhaps—perhaps a good psychiatrist …”
He got up and walked away into the other half of the double room. It was unlit and when he sank down on the sofa I could not see his expression. Leaning forward, he covered his face with his hands.
I was terrified. I knew I had made matters worse and now I did not dare go to him for fear of what new distress I might uncover. I felt paralyzed by guilt, and having been cruelly made aware of my inadequacy, he made no further appeal to me for help.
At last he stood up, moving stiffly as he stepped back into the light. The weight of his pain brushed past me. I was nearly annihilated by it.
“I’ll take you back to the Plaza,” he said.
“Paul, I must say this—it’s not your illness itself. I mean, I’m not frightened of it or anything stupid like that—heavens, how could I be with my classical education? Epilepsy, the mark of the gods! Paul, what I’m trying to say is that my decision to leave isn’t primarily concerned with your illness.”
“We’ll leave now. This way, please.”
“You see, it was because you lied to me—never trusted me. I was manipulated and deceived—”
He swung to face me. We had left his office and were standing at the far end of the great hall. His eyes were black and bitter. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it wasn’t you who sent for me, was it? It was she who sent for me, and when I found that out—”
“Who told you?”
“Elizabeth,” I said faintly, and saw him bow his head in acceptance of some massive and terrible defeat.
I followed him to the car. I was trembling from head to toe, and he was beyond speech. At the end of our silent journey I blurted out, “Will I see you again before I go?”
The Rich Are Different Page 39
