The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  I was bored to tears.

  Finally, after the Abdication, when I felt I couldn’t face reading one more article on the ideological significance of the Spanish Civil War, I plucked up my courage and asked Steve if I might accompany him to the office each day and begin my apprenticeship as unobtrusively as possible.

  “Well, look, honey,” he said. “Give me a little more time, could you? I haven’t forgotten my promise, but while the house is so new I don’t want to do anything which might disturb the clients—and you know how old-fashioned the English are.”

  I left the room without a word. I could not argue with him, because I knew that what he said was true and I had no wish to handicap our joint enterprise. I decided I had to wait until the house was a year old, but when the first anniversary came and Steve made the same excuse I couldn’t help saying, “Steve, how would you feel if you’d been out of work for a year and your wife wouldn’t lift a finger to get you an interesting job?”

  I spoke in a mild voice, but he immediately lost his temper. That was when I realized how guilty he felt about my exclusion. “I can’t help the clients’ attitudes!” he shouted. “Jesus, Dinah, I have enough trouble being a foreigner! How the hell do you think they’d react if I brought in a woman to help me run the show?”

  “Well, at least I’m not a foreigner!” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Dinah,” he said, “face facts. There’d be tremendous prejudice against you, and that prejudice would rebound on me. And I’ll be honest with you. I can’t afford it. I’ve had too many setbacks lately.”

  That was when I first learned that some of his major clients had returned to Van Zale’s.

  “All the more reason why you should take on extra help,” I said calmly.

  “You’re not even trained.”

  “I can learn.”

  “I know, but—”

  “You don’t want me there.”

  “Dinah, it’s the clients.”

  “No, Steve, it’s you.”

  “Well, honey, I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I figure it would really be better for our marriage if—”

  I walked out.

  I walked through the streets into St. James’s Park and down Whitehall to Downing Street. I did not know why I went there except that when I saw the railings I remembered the suffragettes and thought how lucky I had always been, cushioned by Paul’s money and influence from the intractable facts of life. Pausing only to marvel at my past hypocrisy, I walked back into Whitehall and found a taxi to take me home.

  Steve was waiting up for me. The empty bottle of whisky was the first thing I noticed when I entered the library.

  “Dinah—”

  “Steve darling, I’m so sorry.” I kissed him. “I shouldn’t have got so upset. I think I’ve been very stupid for a very long time. Of course it’s quite impossible for me to work at Milk Street, and it’s not your fault either. I think when we originally agreed to go into it together we weren’t being at all realistic.”

  He was stunned by my concessions. “It’s not that I don’t want you there,” he stammered. “I promised you and I hate to break a promise. But the clients—the situation—”

  “I understand. Don’t worry about the promise. I release you from it.”

  “But I know you must be bitterly regretting giving up your business—”

  “Never.” I lit a cigarette with composure. “One must get one’s priorities right. I sold my business for several reasons, not least of which was that I was tired of it and wanted a change. I also sold it to help you outwit Cornelius, who’s obviously quite one of the most dangerous men I’ve never met. My mistake was not in selling the business. I’d do that all over again if I had to. But I do think it was a mistake to think we could work together at our issuing house.”

  There was a pause. At last he said awkwardly, “I’d really like to. If it weren’t for the clients—”

  “Let’s forget the clients, Steve.”

  He reddened in an agony of embarrassment and drank some whisky. “Some husbands and wives can work together, I guess.”

  “Yes. But we can’t. It’s much better to face up to this, Steve, and accept it. It would be a disaster if we tried to work together.”

  “There’s no need to go into reasons!” he said, as if terrified I intended to broadcast from the rooftops that he could not work with a wife who was cleverer than he was, but all I said was a tranquil “There’s no need to go into reasons. It’s simply a fact of life.”

  “But it’s so baffling,” he said with the naïveté which had always touched me. “I don’t get it. I know it’s a fact of life, but I can’t understand why.”

  “Simple biology. You’ve got to feel you’re a winner. Coming second is the biggest genital-chiller known to man.”

  “But that’s not biology! That’s all in the mind!”

  “Maybe the mind of a twenty-first-century man will be different. And maybe I wouldn’t want to go to bed with him, anyway. You’re the one I want to go to bed with, Steve, and you’re right here and now in 1937.”

  “But you must resent me so much—”

  “Rubbish. Oh, darling, can’t you understand? As I said earlier, it’s all a question of priorities. In the very beginning when I didn’t love you I didn’t want to marry you because I knew instinctively I’d never be able to cope with a situation like this. My ambition had to come before everything, and the marriage would inevitably be doomed. That’s why I was always so frightened of marriage—I saw it as an infringement on my right to put my ambition first, a right which I equated with the right to survive. But I define survival differently now, Steve. I’ve at last got what I’ve always wanted, love and security, and I’m not jeopardizing that for all the issuing houses in London! Of course I shall eventually go out to work again—and the sooner the better before I go completely round the bend—but İ no longer equate survival with making a million pounds. I’m not in blinkers any more. I’ve got wider horizons.”

  Three quarters of an hour later in bed he said worried, “But what will you do, Dinah?”

  “Do?” I said vaguely. “Oh, do. Yes, I see. I’m going to follow in my mother’s footsteps. Thank goodness that in this day and age I won’t end up in prison being forcibly fed.”

  He was so astounded that he sat up in bed and switched on the light. “Just say that again, honey. I think I must be going crazy.”

  I obligingly said it again.

  “But why? I thought you said you were so angry with your mother! I thought—”

  “Oh, it was all a misunderstanding,” I said equably. “I realized that this evening. You see, I thought she was campaigning for stupid things like the right to smoke in public and drive a bus—all the sort of thing that the War made possible without any help from the suffragettes. I thought her cause was a pathetic embarrassing antiquated piece of history which had no possible relevance to me. I was wrong.” I sighed. “I’ve been wrong about so many things, Steve. Isn’t it amazing to think that when I first met Paul I thought I knew absolutely everything there was to know?”

  “I guess we all think that at twenty-one. About your mother …”

  “Oh, yes. Well, of course she was campaigning basically against accepting cynicism and hypocrisy as a way of life. She must have been an idealist and she must have reached the stage where she felt that no further compromise with cynicism and hypocrisy was possible. So she took a stand. She stood up for what she believed in. She said, ‘This is wrong and must be stopped.’ ” I paused, thinking of the headlines in the newspapers. “That’s what we’ll all have to say one day,” I said. “All of us.”

  He asked me how I was going to follow in my mother’s footsteps, but I didn’t know. “One could get up on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner and prattle about equality for women,” I said, “but what good would that do? Obviously it would be better to prattle from the back benches at Westminster, but the political parties are so dreary at the moment and anyway I’m no
longer sure where I stand politically. I’ll have to think about it.”

  I was still thinking about it after the Coronation in May when Steve told me another important client had defected to Van Zale’s. He had his explanations ready. There had been trouble with Miller, Simon; they suffered from a fundamental ignorance about Europe which made communication difficult. The new man at the Van Zale office was a two-faced sharpshooter who would stop at nothing to get the clients to return to Six Milk Street. The defecting client was just a stuffy Englishman who wanted to play safe by returning to a long-established house. The market was difficult, Germany was a menace. … The explanations went on and on.

  The truth, which I had suspected at the masquerade ball, was that Steve’s personality was fundamentally alien to the English. When he had been representing an established house with the whole weight of the Van Zale reputation behind him this defect had not mattered, but now that he was on his own he stood out in the Lombard Street community like a samurai at Sandhurst. He was too flamboyant to appeal to the financial men of the City with their shadowed faces, quiet demeanor and rigid codes of conduct. Steve may have been successful in his profession, but the feeling lingered that he was not a gentleman, and even six months after the debacle of the Abdication any American was automatically viewed with suspicion.

  How far Steve was aware that he had been judged by the English and found wanting I had no idea. He was such a curious mixture of the shrewd and the naive that it was hard to guess how sensitive he was to the feelings which lurked behind his defecting clients’ polite façades. He must have known something was wrong, yet he might easily have refused to believe that his personality was responsible for his troubles, and I had no intention of impairing his already shaky self-confidence by pointing out a few home truths. Besides, this would have been pointless. One cannot expect a man to alter his entire personality to suit his clients, and so Steve and I went on, he making excuses and I listening to them without argument, until I gradually realized he was drinking far, far too much.

  He had always been a heavy drinker. I had accepted that and made no effort to change him, but I was conscious as middle age overtook him that the ravages of alcohol were finally taking their toll on his appearance. He had a splendid physique and superb health, but now he was fifty years old and not only looked it but often looked older. His curly hair was gray, his face was heavily lined, his striking eyes were often dull and bloodshot. He had put on weight, too, and as I noticed this steady decline in his looks I realized that any decline in his career could hardly have struck him at a more vulnerable time in his life.

  My anxiety about him increased that summer when Emily the Saint decided to bring all Steve’s American children to England to see him again. Naturally he was grateful to her, because the pressures of his business made it impossible for him to leave England for a visit to America, but I became nervous when Emily announced that she had rented a house by the sea at Bognor Regis for two months. I did not seriously suppose Emily would attempt to seduce him, but I was terrified she would as usual arouse all his guiltiest memories.

  “Shall I come with you to Southampton to meet the ship?” I offered tentatively, although Emily was the very last person I wanted to meet. I felt sure she would have reduced me to despair in no time at all.

  “No, no,” he said. “That would be hell. I always think there’s nothing worse than a wife and an ex-wife trying to be nice to each other while the husband looks on.”

  I agreed, but I still hated to see him go off alone. He met the ship, installed Emily and the children in their Bognor house and staggered back to London.

  “How did it go?” I said, hardly daring to ask.

  “Fine,” he said, pouring himself a triple whisky. “The little girls were very cute and I hardly recognized Scott and Tony because they’d grown so much. They all seemed well and happy and pleased to see me, so I thought I’d go back to Bognor tomorrow with the twins and George,”

  “Good. How’s Emily?”

  “Lovelier and sweeter than ever. I wish to God she’d remarry. It makes me feel so guilty to think of her living alone, bringing up my children single-handed, and all without a single word of reproach.”

  How I managed not to scream I have no idea. I clenched my fists, counted to five and said in a mild voice, “Steve, don’t let the children spend the whole summer at Bognor—let’s have them to stay as often as possible. It’ll be fun, and since Emily has the children all the time she’ll be glad to relax by herself for a change. Why don’t you suggest it?”

  To my relief he did, and soon I had the chance to see my stepsons again and meet my stepdaughters. The little girls were four and six years old, both pretty and both painfully shy. They clung to their nanny and asked hourly when they could go home to “Mama.” Scott was seventeen, tall as Steve and handsome in a dark sultry way which was most attractive, but although Emily had improved his manners I still found him hostile. However, fortunately Tony was so charming that he made up for Scott’s shortcomings. He and Alan picked up their friendship with ease once Alan had returned from Winchester, and Steve thought that the next year Tony might cross the Atlantic on his own to spend the summer with us.

  My own children with the exception of Alan regarded the American invasion without enthusiasm. The twins considered Rosemary and Lorraine hopelessly babyish and Scott and Tony awesomely adult. When George complained that the little girls kept getting in his way I became harassed enough to wonder how Emily coped when they all descended on Bognor, but of course from the moment my children first crossed her rented threshold Emily made sure everyone had a wonderful time.

  “There was this lovely, lovely lady,” said George after the first visit. “Like a queen. I paddled in the sea and she held my hand when a big wave came. Then we had jam sandwiches for tea and chocolate cake and pink ices.”

  “We all played French cricket,” said Edred. “It was absolutely ripping. Everyone played, even Emily and even Scott. We laughed and laughed and afterwards had lots of lemonade which Emily had made herself.”

  “Emily has real gold hair,” said Elfrida. “I asked her if it was dyed and Nanny was livid with me, but Emily just laughed and said it was real. She had a jolly nice bathing costume and she told me how pretty my dress was and asked if you had my clothes specially made for me, so I said no and told her about Marshall and Snelgrove. She was nice. We talked for ages.”

  “I’m so glad, darling,” I said in a cocktail-party voice.

  “You can come down to Bognor with us next time if you like, Alan,” said Steve. Alan had been at Winchester during the first visit to Emily. “I know Emily wants to meet you.”

  “Thank you,” said Alan, who had long since rejected his Van Zale relations as thoroughly as he had rejected Paul, “but no.”

  “Why?” demanded Edred. “Emily’s your cousin. She explained it to us. Your father was her mother’s brother—”

  “Grandmother’s brother,” corrected Elfrida.

  “I’m not interested, in distant relatives.”

  “How rude!” said Elfrida. “And Emily’s so nice!”

  “Elfrida,” I said gently, “leave Alan alone. He may have all sorts of reasons which you know nothing about.”

  “Oh, you always take Alan’s side!” stormed Elfrida, and she rushed from the room.

  “I need a drink,” I said to Steve.

  “God, so do I!”

  We drank and went on drinking. Eventually in early September Emily went back to America. I was never more relieved to know that the Queen Mary had left Southampton, and my consumption of alcohol went into an abrupt decline.

  Unfortunately Steve’s did not.

  It was early in 1938 when I first heard the rumors which Cornelius was disseminating about him. I had been in Norfolk inspecting the flood damage, for that February the sea broke through Horsey Gap to make Mallingham an island again and the waves had even reached the walls of the Hall. By the time I returned to London I was exhausted by
the effort of cleaning up the mess, but I was determined not to cancel an important lunch I had arranged to further my new career. I had decided to interest myself in women’s education. It seemed to me that the more women were well-educated the more likely they would be to object strongly when they later found themselves underpaid, underprivileged and underestimated by their co-workers, and my vision of the future encompassed a world where so many women were sufficiently well-educated to hold well-paid jobs that the government was forced to legislate against discrimination by sex. I was prepared to admit that this was a somewhat radical vision, but I was surprised when so many people found it shocking.

  I was just expressing these sentiments over lunch at the Savoy to my three guests, all of whom had important posts in the world of women’s education, when I heard an American say at the next table, “… and so I went to Van Zale’s in New York.”

  “Did you see Van Zale himself?” asked his English companion.

  “Yes, he was very competent, just a young guy, but it was clear he knew what he was doing. Later I told him how surprised I was that Sullivan quit. Have you ever met Sullivan?”

  “No, but we’ve all heard of him, of course. He’ll come a cropper before long. He drinks, you know.”

  “So Van Zale said. In fact, Van Zale said that Sullivan’s ‘resignation’ wasn’t voluntary—they had to get rid of him and were nice enough to let him leave with his reputation intact.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” said the Englishman. “But they’ve got a good man at Van Zale’s in Milk Street now, an American but educated in England, really a very civilized sort of chap.” And he began to talk about the benefits of an English education.

  My guests were still talking enthusiastically about founding a new organization to promote grammar-school education for girls, but I could no longer concentrate and as soon as I decently could I went home.