The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  “Of course,” he said politely. “I hope I’m not so discourteous that I’m incapable of coming down to the ship tomorrow to wish you a safe voyage. Besides, I must say goodbye to Alan.”

  I started to cry again as the car halted outside the hotel.

  “Good night, Dinah,” he said, and stared out of the window as I crawled from the car.

  The next thing I knew I was upstairs in the suite and hunting for something to drink. For a time I was too occupied with my sobs to think or see clearly, but eventually I did realize that the suite was dry. Mayers had still not restocked the bedroom cupboard.

  “Oh, God!” I wept, as distraught as any alcoholic, and wasted five minutes futilely cursing Prohibition. I thought of a speakeasy and quailed. I considered bribing a waiter and flinched. Finally I telephoned Grace Clayton.

  It was Bruce who answered.

  “Oh Bruce, it’s Dinah!”

  “Yes?” That was a cool reception. Amidst all my distress I remembered his growing eccentricity and rebelled against it.

  “Is Grace there?” I said coldly.

  “No, she had to go up to Greenwich. Her mother’s not well.”

  “Oh.” I felt desperate. “Bruce, could I come over and cadge a drink? I feel just like jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Well, frankly it’s not very convenient. I’m having a very important meeting of the C.M.S.—tomorrow’s our Wall Street parade. Can you go and get a drink somewhere else?”

  I hung up on him in a fury, wasted some more time cursing his Citizens for Militant Socialism, and dialed Terence O’Reilly’s number in Greenwich Village. I had seen nothing of Terence for some weeks. After I had conspicuously compromised my principles by sharing Paul with Sylvia he had no doubt decided I could be of no further use to him in his attempts to detach Sylvia from her husband. As I waited for him to answer the telephone I wondered if he would be as rude to me as Bruce but decided I was too distraught to care.

  “Terence? Oh Terence, it’s Dinah Slade. Listen, I’m in desperate need of a good strong drink. I promise I won’t stay longer than five minutes, but—”

  “Come right on over,” he said, “and I’ll fix you the biggest martini in town.”

  I gasped with relief, grabbed my handbag and fled downtown to his flat.

  III

  “Problems?” said Terence, dropping a sliver of lemon into a glass the size of a goldfish bowl. He was casually dressed in a thin blue shirt and off-white slacks. It was hot in his neat apartment although a fan labored valiantly by the window.

  “Unspeakable problems, yes.” I collapsed on the sofa and guzzled the martini. “You’re looking very smug!” I commented sourly as I paused for air. “In fact, you remind of a cat—it must be the green eyes. Where’s your bowl of cream?”

  He laughed. I was aware of his excitement, as if he had a delicious secret and was savoring it ounce by ounce in some intensely private corner. “Go easy with that drink!” he warned. “If you’re not careful you could well find yourself dead drunk in five minutes! What’s been going on?”

  “I can’t explain, it’s too complicated, but I ended up at the Plaza with nothing to drink and I phoned the Claytons but Grace was away and that idiotic Bruce was in the middle of a meeting—”

  “Ah yes, the C.M.S.! They’re due to parade up Wall Street tomorrow with the usual anticapitalist jeers and sneers. The Van Zale clerks have been drawing lots for the best positions by the front windows. It’s not often we have that kind of excitement on the Street.”

  “Well, I used to like Bruce very much,” I said, “but I think he’s gone absolutely mad and I feel jolly sorry for Grace. He’s not going to try and blow up Van Zale’s, is he? That would be the last straw!”

  “A repeat of the 1920 rumpus when some lunatic tried to blow up the House of Morgan? Not a chance! Bruce may be eccentric but he’s nonviolent. He’s even forbidden his followers to carry guns. If you want my opinion the entire parade is going to be a complete waste of time, but—Is anything the matter?”

  “Heavens, I think I’m going to be sick. Where’s the—”

  “This way.” He steered me adroitly into the bathroom and abandoned me at the basin.

  I tried to be sick but failed. I had had enough of the martini to feel like death but not enough to embark on the road to recovery. After five minutes I staggered out.

  “I’ll get you some medicine,” said Terence when he saw my face. “Go into the bedroom and lie down.”

  “You won’t jump on me?”

  “No, I like my women a little soberer than you are.”

  I heard him opening the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. “Here,” he said, offering me a glass of effervescing liquid, “drink this.”

  “Thanks. Goodness, I’m sorry—how awful of me. I do feel low. I never used to get blotto like this in London.”

  “It’s Prohibition,” said Terence sympathetically. “People drink twice as much as they normally do when they have to make an effort to get the drink.” He opened the bedroom door for me and I closed it firmly in case he had any idea of following me inside. There was an unmistakable sexual edge to his simmering excitement; I had the uneasy feeling that the smug cat with his bowl of cream could be transformed all too swiftly into a tomcat on the prowl.

  I did drink some of the medicine, but when my head started to spin I lay down on the bed. The medicine felt as if it might work. I drank some more. Ten minutes later, overcome by the desire to extricate myself from Terence’s bedroom, I pressed my right hand down upon the book which sat on the bedside table and levered myself to my feet. The room promptly revolved, and when I clawed at the table to steady myself the book shot off onto the floor. Presently I crawled to the rescue. The book’s spine was broken. The pages had fallen open at Terence’s place, which was marked by a letter, and as I was reaching for the book I saw the Mexican stamps on the envelope.

  I remembered that Greg Da Costa had a ranch in Mexico.

  I did not normally read other people’s letters, but this one tempted me because I could think of no good reason why a Van Zale employee should be in private correspondence with a man who had a huge grudge against Paul.

  Perhaps the letter had come from someone else. I took a peek into the envelope and deciphered the word “Greg.” That settled it. Abandoning any attempt to behave like a lady, I read the letter from end to end.

  “Come down whenever you want,” Greg Da Costa had written in a large curiously uneducated handwriting, “but my advice is don’t wait too long. Hope all goes well with the parade down Wall Street. Workers of the world, unite! Christ, how my poor father would have laughed, God rest his blue-blooded, Eastern-Seaboard soul! Cable me if there’s any hitch. Good luck, Greg.”

  I read the letter three times and became more disturbed with each reading. What interest could Greg Da Costa possibly have in a parade which Terence had told me would be a complete waste of time? What was the “hitch” he feared and why was Terence to cable him? And why was Terence being advised to flee to Mexico at the earliest opportunity?

  Yet the letter betrayed nothing, and there was no phrase which was incapable of a trivial explanation. Terence could be cultivating Greg to keep an eye on his activities. It would be consistent with his position as Paul’s chief of police. If the marchers planned some noisy demonstration of their political beliefs on the doorstep of Van Zale’s, Greg could well be gleeful in anticipation of Paul’s embarrassment, and the “hitch” might refer to the possibility of Bruce’s being arrested. Even the invitation to Mexico, when seen in the context of Greg’s illiterate handwriting, might possibly have no connection with the subject of the parade which followed it. Greg could even have been referring to some change in the climate when he had advised Terence not to delay his visit too long.

  I told myself repeatedly that there was no melodramatic explanation, but when I read the letter a fourth time I was conscious not of its ambiguities but of the air of conspiracy which permeated it. It was onl
y after I had replaced the letter that I saw the book’s title. It was The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s story of a man who had created a new world for himself in order to win a rich man’s wife.

  “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 hello, 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.

  IV

  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 leaned 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 judgment: “We’ve missed each other in time.”

  In grief I wished he were younger, and in a moment of useless rage I saw again his vision of the plowed 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 makeup 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, “Hello, 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 that his suit was streaked with blood.

  PART FOUR

  Steve: The Sportsman

  1926-1929

  One

  I

  “HE WAS ASSASSINATED,” I SAID.

  She burst into tears. She cried and cried. I had to remind myself that this was slick smart hardboiled Dinah Slade, adventuress, troublemaker 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 hip flask 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 each other 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 rocksteady now, her voice cold.

  “Maybe later.”

  “No. Now.”

  I shrugged, opened the bottle of rye and topped up the tooth mugs, “All right,” I said abruptly, “this is the way it was. …”

  II

  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 mention 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 maximum suspicion.