In the dining room we drank a pot of weak coffee, but she left all the scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages and toast to me. There were kidneys too under the lid of another silver chafing dish, but I left those alone. Much as I wanted to blend with the English, I drew the line at sharing their taste for offal, and besides, a kidney isn’t what you want to see first thing in the morning after an evening’s heavy drinking.
“Alan should be down soon,” said Dinah after telling the maid to bring another pot of coffee. “He usually wakes up at about this time.”
I wanted to ask several questions about Alan but wasn’t sure how to do it without raising Paul’s ghost. In the end I asked safe neutral questions about his school and she told me he loved his lessons and had plenty of friends. We talked a little longer. Even allowing for maternal exaggeration I wondered if the picture she painted of this happy little kid without a care in the world was quite as accurate as she wanted it to be.
In the end I had to ask. I couldn’t help myself. “He’s all right, is he?” I said.
Some terrible memory burned briefly in her eyes and vanished. “Perfect,” she said coolly, and added as the maid reentered the room, “More coffee?”
Now that we were up to our necks in memories of Paul I thought I might as well go on. “Do you ever talk to him about Paul?” I said when my cup was full of coffee again.
“A bit. Not much. I find it terribly difficult. Anyway, Alan never seems to want to know anything about him.”
“Maybe he sees how upset you get and doesn’t dare ask. No, forget I said that. It’s none of my business. … Are you going to take him back to America some day?”
She looked genuinely surprised, as if I had made an extraordinary suggestion. “What for?” she said. “It’s not as if he has any affectionate American relations who would make him feel welcome.”
“Don’t you want to show him his father’s palace at One Willow Street?”
An odd expression came into her eyes. Paul was right there in the room with us now. I could almost see him reaching for an unbuttered slice of toast after pushing away the weak coffee with a shudder.
At last she said, “Cornelius will never share that bank with Alan.”
“Honey,” I said, “it’s not Cornelius’ bank.”
A couple of uneventful seconds trickled away. A bird perched on the sill and sang his heart out. Beyond him the drizzle had stopped and the sun was starting to shine.
“Well, of course,” she said slowly, “it would be nice to know there’d be no obstacles placed in Alan’s way in the unlikely event of him wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps.”
“All he’d ever have to do is cross the Atlantic and knock on my door.”
“And Cornelius?” she persisted.
“Oh, he won’t be around at Willow and Wall by that time. He’ll be backing talkies or investing in airplanes, and banking’ll be no more than a distant memory.”
She was fascinated. “Are you sure?”
“Why do you think I’m in Europe? I’m going to build up a base of power so broad that in five years’ time I’ll be able to reach across the Atlantic and tip him out of the nest. I’ve got it all mapped out.”
“My God!” she said. “You do hate him, don’t you! What’s been going on?”
“I’ll tell you the whole story,” I said, but didn’t. I just said Cornelius was throwing his weight around by threatening to withdraw his capital from the firm unless he got what he wanted. “The money’s gone straight to his head,” I explained. “He’s a power-crazy punk who’s got too big for his little boy’s sneakers. He acts not only as if all the world’s for sale but as if he ought to get a fifty percent discount. He’s—”
“He’s the Villain of the Piece!” she laughed, relaxing suddenly. Her eyes were sparkling, her hangover forgotten. It was good to see her in such high spirits again. “I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for him! Isn’t there really anyone in the world who thinks he’s sweet and adorable?”
“Well, there’s his mother and sister. I guess they think he’s cute. And there’s Sylvia—” I saw her face and broke off. I knew it was time to kick Paul out of the room. “What are we going to do this morning?” I demanded abruptly, rising to my feet. “Can we go sailing again?”
We went sailing and took Alan with us. It was a great morning, and afterward at the Hall we had the traditional English Sunday lunch, overcooked roast beef sliced wafer thin, rock-hard roast potatoes and a slab of pulpy Yorkshire pudding. I must have been crazy with hunger because I ate everything in sight, and after the treacle tart I sagged back in my chair like a sack of gravel.
Alan and his nurse went down to the village to see a friend.
“Time to exercise!” Dinah said ruthlessly and suggested a brisk walk, but this time I overruled her and the only brisk walk we took was straight upstairs to her bedroom.
It wasn’t until Alan was in bed that she got me talking about the bank again. I didn’t intend to discuss my work. Investment banking isn’t the most fascinating subject for a woman, and even Caroline, who took such a strong vicarious interest in my career, would yawn whenever I talked of the thrills of a giant merger. But Dinah started talking about Hal Beecher, whom she knew well, and one thing led to another until before I knew where I was I was telling her about the glories of Van Zale Participations. At first I thought that her show of attention was no more than a gesture of politeness, but then I realized she was genuinely interested in investment trusts. She was used to the business world. She read the Financial Times daily and had a good grasp of current economics. For the first time in my life I found I was with a woman who not only could listen intelligently when I talked about my work but could actually turn the conversation into a stimulating discussion.
“My God,” I said as the truth slowly dawned on me, “you really do run that business, don’t you?”
She looked at me as if I’d forgotten to lace up my straitjacket. “But of course I run it!” she exclaimed. “What did you think? Do you imagine I’m just a puppet and Hal pulls all the strings?”
“Of course not!” I protested, very hot under the collar.
My discomfort must have been entertainingly obvious, for she laughed. “Why do you think Paul took an interest in me?”
“Well, I naturally assumed … Well, I mean, it was kind of obvious … You see, we all thought …” I gave up.
“Even if I hadn’t been his mistress I would have been his protégée. He always made that quite clear.”
“Yeah.” I gazed at her with new eyes, and then realizing it would be more dignified to stop gaping at her and stage a double-quick recovery, I said smoothly, “No wonder you were so special to Paul! Say, Dinah, I know it’s none of my business, but while we’re on the subject of how special you were to him, what exactly did Paul say in that last letter he wrote you? I’ve always wondered.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “What last letter?”
We stared at each other.
“Didn’t you get it?” I said surprised. “I always assumed Mayers found the envelope lying around and put it in the mail to you, but obviously he must have destroyed it when he destroyed all the other personal letters. Paul wrote to you the night before he died, Dinah. He took the envelope with him to the office that morning. I saw it myself.”
She was greatly disturbed. “Did he give you any hint about what he’d said?”
“I got the impression it was the purplest prose that ever dripped from a romantic pen.” I paused before adding abruptly, “I’ll be honest with you. I told him to shelve it. He was in a bad state, not in touch with the cold hard facts of life. I didn’t think it would do anyone any good if that letter ever crawled out of the envelope into the light of day.”
There was a long, long silence. Then she said in a shaky voice, “Do you think he wanted to come after me to Mallingham?”
Rage shot through me. I felt angry with her for clinging to the past and furious with myself for raising the subj
ect. Worst of all I hated Paul for staying so vividly alive long after his memory should have begun to fade.
I managed not to speak, but I clenched my fists as I turned away.
“Oh, Steve,” she said. “Steve.”
Her arms were around my neck. She was kissing me. “Don’t let’s look back,” she whispered at last. “I do so hate to look back.”
Sometime later I was able to say violently, “I’d like to make a bonfire of all those old memories and dance in the ashes!”
She laughed. She’d just fixed us drinks, and now she raised her glass to mine. “To the ashes!” she said boldly, challenging me to laugh with her, and the future swung round to face us as the door banged shut on the past.
II
It took me less than a month to realize I was crazy about her. Of course I wasn’t in love—my craziness did have its limits— but I liked her better than any other woman I’d ever met. What I liked best about her was that she never leaned on me in any way. After all, it’s a fact of life that for a man a woman is usually a bit of a burden, and no matter how much he may care for her the chances are that she’ll be a dependent creature who looks to him for support. Even Caroline, who bawled loudly about women’s emancipation in the course of spreading the birth-control gospel, was dependent on me for everything she needed and had never made any real effort to lead a less conventional life. I’d never objected to this state of affairs either. When a man’s young it makes him feel strong and masterful to have a woman dependent on him, but I wasn’t a kid anymore and I no longer needed a dependent woman to prove to me how strong and masterful I was. I had reached the stage where I could appreciate a woman who could enjoy my success without devouring it like a parasite, and Dinah filled the bill. She was no millstone round my neck. She made me feel free as air. In her independence I found my own emancipation, and I wanted to tell all those husbands who kept their wives hooked up to the kitchen sink that the taste of my freedom was very, very sweet.
So that was one advantage about Dinah: she made no demands on me because she had a busy satisfying life of her own. But there were other advantages. She was mature enough to conduct an affair without any messy scenes, she was smart enough not to kid herself that I’d ever leave my wife, she was tremendous fun, and she was just as great in bed as I’d always suspected she would be. Well, how often does a man meet a woman like that? Not often, as we all know. I felt I was very lucky, and to my gratification she told me she felt she was lucky too.
“You’re so wonderfully straightforward!” she said admiringly. “No neuroses, no complexes, no problems! I can’t tell you how relaxing you are!”
I thought of Caroline, her nose in her amateur-psychology handbook as she remorselessly analyzed the effects of my father’s early death. My mother, whom I’d loved, had been classified as “too narcissistic” to achieve a truly maternal response to her sons. My stepfather, whom I had liked enormously, had been called the “architect of my adolescent instability” for his friendly refusal to adopt a paternal attitude where one was sorely needed. I was told that this absence of “adequate parental authority and guidance” had contributed to my “antisocial tendencies” at educational institutions, and had resulted in Luke and Matt becoming “unnaturally dependent” on me. Their emotional development was labeled “arrested” and my concern for my brothers’ welfare was called a “fixation.”
When I really thought about it I realized I must have been a saint to have put up with this kind of drivel from my wife for so long.
Nuts to Caroline, I thought happily in my new mood of emancipation, but as time went on I found I could no longer dismiss Caroline from my mind just by saying “Nuts.” Caroline was fast becoming my biggest headache. Scrupulously I wrote to her every week for fear that if I didn’t she might leap aboard the next ship to Europe, and equally scrupulously she answered my letters by return mail to reassure me that Luke and Matt were behaving themselves, but the peace of mind I received from these regular reports only made me realize how important it was not to quarrel with her. That I was teetering on the brink of some unplumbed marital abyss was obvious even to me, coasting along as I was on the golden crest of my new affair. Caroline might encourage me to relax occasionally with other women, but I was pretty sure the boundaries of the new sexual freedom she preached would stop far short of the kind of relationship I was now enjoying with Dinah Slade.
From that deduction it was just a short step to asking myself what I was going to do when Caroline arrived in London. I analyzed my position carefully. I was crazy about Dinah, but it wouldn’t last. It was true that at the moment I couldn’t see our affair ever ending, but that was because I was temporarily crazy. The affair would end, I’d be left with nothing but a second divorce and limited access to my sons, and my English clients, whom I was trying so hard to cultivate, wouldn’t like it at all.
I didn’t want to make any bad mistakes.
The most sensible course I could see was to tone down my affair with Dinah to the point where I could make Caroline believe it was unimportant, and then involve Caroline so thoroughly in her new social duties that she wouldn’t have time to keep too sharp an eye on me. It was a tricky situation, but with a little finesse I thought I could handle it.
Dinah wasn’t much interested in Caroline. She just thought that as Caroline was a complaisant wife there was no problem. The ones who interested her were my brothers.
“Steve,” she said one day, “just how old are these two ‘boys’ you keep referring to?”
“Thirty-seven.” I sighed. “It’s not just because I had to bring them up single-handed,” I said, trying to explain why I felt so responsible for them. “It’s because I’ve always had all the luck and I feel guilty about it. I can remember my father saying to my mother that his own life would have been quite different if his brother had shared his luck with him. Uncle was very successful and very rich and very mean.”
“I always distrust people who make those sort of remarks,” said Dinah. “My father used to say that his life would have been quite different if he’d ever found a woman who understood him, but of course the truth was that all his women understood him much too well. What went wrong with your father’s life, Steve? I thought you told me he had pots of money and loads of friends and was the life and soul of every party.”
“Yeah.” I was silent, remembering my father.
She waited, not rushing me, but at last she said, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“Hell, it’s no big deal,” I said. “He drank.”
“Did he? God, what a coincidence—so did my father! What did your mother do—leave or stay?”
“She stayed.”
“Mine left.” Now it was her turn to be silent.
“What happened to her, Dinah?”
“Don’t pretend Paul never told you!”
It all came out. Dinah’s mother had been a suffragette who had died in jail. I was just about to make some sympathetic comment when she said fiercely, “And don’t you dare say ‘Like mother, like daughter’ because I shan’t think it’s at all funny.”
“Jesus, Dinah,” I said nettled, “where’s the resemblance? You’re no idealist. You wouldn’t even get up on a Hyde Park Corner soapbox to crusade for your beliefs, let alone go to jail for them. You’d be too busy sweet-talking Hal Beecher into giving you a new loan to expand your million-dollar business!”
She stared at me. To my surprise I saw she was at a loss for words.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” I said. “The one thing all Paul’s people have in common is that they’re plugged fairly and squarely into reality. A little sentimentality now and then is just about excusable, but idealism? Forget it! You don’t get along in the world by toting around a set of romantic ideals. Paul found that out when he was just a kid, and he never forgot it.”
She was still silent. I wondered what she was thinking. At last I said, “Were you afraid I’d laugh about your mother being a suffra
gette? What’s the problem? You know how I feel about emancipated women!” And I kissed her with unmistakable enthusiasm.
She laughed and kissed me back. “What a sportsman you are, darling!” she teased. “All for fair play between the sexes!”
“Particularly play,” I said, but I was pleased. I was kind of proud of my modern outlook on women, and in a further effort to convince Dinah that I was all for female emancipation I asked if I could visit her office to see the tycoon tigress in action.
I knew from Hal Beecher’s reports that Diana Slade Cosmetics was making around four hundred thousand pounds a year, which at the going rate of exchange was well on the way to two million dollars. Twenty-four different cosmetic products were showcased in the famous Grafton Street salon and peddled by a network of salesmen in every major city in the British Isles. The salon, which preserved the firm’s reputation for expensive products for the aristocracy despite a surreptitious recent trend to tout a cut-rate line for the masses, was run by Dinah’s friend Harriet, an energetic spinster with a face like a greyhound. Harriet took care of the society side, the constant entertaining and socializing, while Dinah revealed herself at a party only when she wanted to give her clientele a treat. This strategy had evolved when Dinah was a new unmarried mother beyond the social pale, but now it had been revived to give Dinah an air of mystery. It not only was a neat public-relations move but also meant that Dinah could have some sort of private life. The two girls got along well. I did no more than poke my nose in the salon, since it was obviously the kind of place where no man could feel at ease for more than two seconds, but I could almost hear the purrs of the clients as they submitted themselves to God only knows what feminine rites.
In the executive offices upstairs I met the sales director, a tough little fairy with a tongue like prussic acid, and the production director who controlled the laboratory. There was another director in charge of the warehouse and inventory. The advertising department was run by a woman, a situation which would have rocked Madison Avenue, and frankly I thought the advertising could have been improved. It was too wordy, but Dinah said that English women appreciated ads which ran on and on like a three-decker novel, and she produced the sales figures to prove it, so I had to back down. There was also a lady in charge of personnel, but I approved of that because all the little typists like to run to a nice motherly figure if any randy member of staff starts pinching bottoms.
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