“Why didn’t you send Sam to correct his own mistakes?”
“I thought he ought to stay at home and practice being neutral.” Cornelius looked glum. “My worst dread is that as soon as America enters the war he’ll be interned. God knows what I’d do without Sam at Willow and Wall. I don’t even like to think about it.”
“So you foresee America entering the war?”
“Well, that’s what we usually do, isn’t it? Well come in eventually, straighten you all out and pick up the sordid bits and pieces. The only difference between this war and the last is that after this one the Pax Britannica will be as dead as a dodo and we’ll see the dawn of the Pax Americana.” He sipped his tea meditatively. “Europe will be a museum piece,” he said, “but perhaps still a field for American economic expansion. I think I’ll eventually invest in the tourist industry. You have such nice old buildings here, really very quaint. I can understand why you spend so much time looking backward into the past instead of concentrating on the present and preparing for the future.”
“We are tomorrow’s past,” I said, reaching for a cigarette, “and the future is only a continuation of what has gone before. Do you have a light?”
“I don’t smoke.” But he sprang up, reached for the box of matches above the fireplace and lit my cigarette for me.
We looked at each other across the flame.
“Why are you here?” I said quietly as the flame died.
When he replaced the matches he paused by the fireplace. “Well, you won’t believe this,” he said ruefully, “but I come waving the olive branch of peace again.”
“Same olive branch?”
“Right down to the last identical olive. Look, Dinah, this feud is quite unnecessary, and now that Steve’s dead I consider the whole unfortunate matter closed. Forgive me—perhaps I should have offered my condolences, but in the circumstances I really felt they would have been inappropriate. I despise hypocrisy,” said Cornelius, giving me a straight honest look with his black-lashed gray eyes, “and I wouldn’t have wanted to insult your intelligence by telling you how sorry I was about Steve.”
“Quite.”
“I’m sorry you equate his accidental death with the suicide of Jason Da Costa, but I honestly don’t feel they’re comparable. However …”—he cleared his throat—“I accept that you have a right to be angry with me, and I’d like to do what I can to make amends. You must be worried about your children and the imminent invasion. Maybe you’re also worried financially. Well, all I’m saying is that there’s no need for you to worry anymore—just say the word and I’ll arrange for you to leave the country and work in America until the war’s over. I know we could make a lot of money if we did business together, so I suggest we meet in London this week to work out a suitable agreement with our lawyers. Let me assure you again that my offer to set up in a new business in New York is completely bona fide.”
I stood up to face him. He stopped leaning lightly against the chimneypiece and straightened his back.
“Do I have a choice?” I said,
“Why, of course you do! You can say yes. Or you can say no. Only,” said Cornelius, with a sigh as he moved to the window and gazed over Mallingham Broad, “I really wouldn’t advise you to say no.”
He stroked the wall of my home with his index finger and sighed again. “This is such a lovely, lovely house,” he said. “I’d just hate anything to happen to this house, Dinah, I really would. I hope it survives the war.”
It was absolutely quiet. He turned dreamily to face me, his movements languid, his beautiful eyes glowing. He was intoxicated with his triumph, exhilarated by his power.
At last I said, “How can I be sure it survives the war?”
“I can arrange for it to be handled with care during the occupation.”
“Oh, but the Germans won’t be coming,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”
“Tell that to the British army in France! But you don’t really have to worry about the Germans, Dinah,” he said, reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulling out a long brown envelope. “The only person you have to worry about is me.”
He opened the envelope. He drew out the Mallingham conveyance. And he fanned his face with it leisurely as he watched me.
“May I pour you another cup of tea?” he inquired kindly as I sank down in my chair.
I did not answer. He poured more tea for us both, tucked the deed carefully away in his pocket again and once more sat down opposite me on the sofa.
“If I accept your offer to come to America,” I said steadily at last, “does that guarantee Mallingham’s safety?”
“Well, naturally it does, Dinah! And if things go well I’ll even convey the property to you. But that, of course”—he smiled at me—”would depend on how … agreeable you are in New York.”
I saw the expression in his eyes and read his mind as effortlessly as if it were a slogan on a poster fifteen feet high. This was no naïve hankering to follow in Paul’s footsteps; this was the exercise of sexual power in the pursuit of revenge. He would humiliate me in New York, shame me before my children and still have Mallingham reduced to rubble. There was no promise he could ever make which would guarantee to me the safety of my home.
I had always thought I would be overcome with terror when I received incontrovertible evidence of his final plan, but now I found to my surprise that my knowledge at once gave me new courage. I had always been resolved to outwit Cornelius; now I was fanatical in my determination not to be defeated by him. Men like Cornelius Van Zale deserved to be beaten to their knees. I could never let him win. It would be an outrage.
I thought of The Revenge, of Sir Richard Grenville exhorting his men to fight on, and I smiled.
“My dear Cornelius!” I exclaimed. “Is that a proposition? What a compliment! I’ve never been propositioned before by a handsome millionaire seven years my junior! I feel positively rejuvenated!”
He was watching me closely, his hard dry narrow mind calculating the chance of success with great shrewdness and minute attention to detail. He would not be an easy man to fool. With a pounding heart I forced myself to look guilelessly at the stark bones beneath his pale skin, the brutal line of his mouth and the bleakness of his stone-cold gray eyes.
“But why should I be surprised?” I added pleasantly. “You’ve always followed closely in Paul’s footsteps, haven’t you?”
“Paul’s dead,” he said, and for a split second I looked straight through the windows of his eyes into the full dark complexity of his bereavement.
I felt as if I had seen some horrible mutilation. In an effort to conceal how shaken I was I made a great business of stubbing out my cigarette, smoothing my skirt over my knees and taking a sip of tea.
“When can we meet in London to draw up this agreement?” I said abruptly.
He was reassured by the businesslike tone of my voice. “Monday?” he suggested, crossing one leg casually over the other.
“I’m afraid it may be difficult for me to leave here before Tuesday. Would you mind waiting until then?”
“I’m sure the occasion will be worth waiting for!” he said gallantly with his best boyish smile. “Will you have dinner with me afterward? I’m staying with the American ambassador, but maybe I can take a suite at Claridge’s for the evening. I feel a new partnership deserves a little celebration.”
“Delightful!” I said. “But may I recommend a suite at the Savoy? It’s so beautiful in the early morning to look down the river and see the dawn break beyond St. Paul’s.”
I’d hooked him. I saw the fascination creep into his eyes, the prurient interest, the barely suppressed shimmer of eroticism.
“I’d like that,” he said.
I let my smile linger and rose to my feet. “I’ll come downstairs to see you off,” I volunteered. “You have a long drive back to London.”
He gave me the card of the Van Zale solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn. “Shall we say two-thirty on Tuesday at that addre
ss? I’ll be there unless I hear from you to the contrary.”
“All right. Yes, that’s fine.” Clasping the card tightly, I showed him downstairs and across the hall to the front door.
His chauffeur-driven limousine was waiting in the drive.
“On loan from the embassy,” explained Cornelius, pausing to say goodbye. “The ambassador’s been very hospitable to me.”
He held out his hand. I shook it without hesitation. As my flesh crawled I reminded myself it was the first and last contact I would ever have with him.
“So long, Dinah. It was fun meeting you at last. I’m glad we were able to do business together.”
“See you on Tuesday, Cornelius!” I watched him drive away, and when the car had disappeared I swung very slowly to face the house.
I looked at it until my eyes ached in the hot glare of the sun, and as my vision blurred I could see only the quotation from The Revenge which Paul had inscribed long ago in my treasured volume of Tennyson. Blindly I moved indoors, but long before I reached the library I heard Paul’s voice ringing in my ears:
“ ‘Sink me the ship, Master Gunner! Sink her—split her in twain! Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’ ”
II
I thought about it for a long time, and later, much later, when the hall clock had chimed midnight and I was still moving restlessly around the house, my mind closed upon the decision and I knew there was no turning back. I had stopped weeping hours ago and was calm. I felt I could see everything so clearly, past, present and future, and as they fused within me I saw truths which I had once thought were dead but which I now knew could live again and give my decision meaning.
I thought first of Mallingham. Even if I could somehow save it from Cornelius what would happen to it in the brave new world of the Pax Americana which Cornelius had forecast with such relish? War always brought huge social upheavals; I could remember the postwar world of the early twenties too well not to know what kind of future awaited a Europe which was once more in ruins. There would be poverty, unemployment and a widespread desire to share whatever wealth remained from the war. The socialists if not the communists would then surely come into their own and we would see the leveling, the crusade against inherited wealth, the rejection of the aristocracy, the indifference if not outright hostility towards the large country houses which survived. The conservative I had become found this prospect deeply disturbing, but the socialist I had been long ago accepted the prospect with resignation. England’s grandeur had been built in the previous centuries by the sweated labor of millions to be enjoyed by a fortunate few, but in the twentieth century those millions would inevitably demand their equality. And what would happen to Mallingham then? Would it be requisitioned by the state, torn down and replaced with new bungalows for the proletariat? Or perhaps converted into flats? Or a hotel? I saw clearly that if neither Cornelius nor the Germans destroyed Mallingham the English of the future almost certainly would. Everything changed; nothing was forever. Mallingham had come to the end of its long and splendid life, and it was my task, as the last Slade who would ever care for the house, to see that it died not ingloriously but with dignity and honor.
Having thought of Mallingham, I thought of myself. I knew there could be no compromise with Cornelius. But even if Cornelius had never existed, could I have returned to the all-consuming task of earning a second fortune in order to keep Mallingham safe from the ravages of a changed social order? I could make the money; I had proved that to myself long ago. But I had proved too that in sacrificing my time and talents to the pursuit of money I had seen little of my children, still less of Mallingham and nothing whatsoever of the ideals which I had come to believe in with all my mother’s passion. I had been so terrified of the circumstances of my mother’s death that I had spent years backing away from her idealism, but, as I had told Steve, I now saw her struggle differently. When her cause was stripped of its rhetoric and wiped clean of its emotional sexual divisiveness I saw she had been fighting not just for the right to vote but for justice, for equality before the law, for the concepts which Pericles had championed twenty-five hundred years ago and which applied to neither one sex nor the other but to all mankind. I wanted not to worship at the altar of Mammon for the rest of my life but to work for those ideals of democracy; I wanted not to sacrifice myself endlessly for Mallingham but to fulfill myself by leading a life which would benefit others; and last I wanted my children not to grow up regarding me as a money-hungry stranger who would sell her soul for a house but as a comfortingly familiar figure who possessed ideals which knew no compromise and a romance which no cynicism could destroy.
I thought of Steve’s dying words: “Mallingham’s like the bank, Dinah. Not real, not flesh and blood.”
Steve had known the truth at the end.
I heard Alan’s voice—Paul’s voice—saying decisively, “The pursuit of money for money’s sake is morally indefensible and ideologically obscene.”
Paul might once have said those words, but when I had known him he had been too deeply enmeshed in his moral quicksands to struggle free. He had lost his struggle with corruption and that was why he had left me at Mallingham before Alan was born. But I was not lost, not yet. I had been as deeply enmeshed as he had ever been in the pursuit of wealth and power, but I was being given the chance to pull myself free of those quicksands, just as he had been given the chance when he had met me. He had let the chance pass by and in the end his decision had destroyed him. But I could still take my chance and I was going to take it I would take it and survive.
Let Cornelius keep his wealth and power! Let him live with the gods he had chosen for himself! But I was going to show him before our paths parted forever that he was powerless against me, and that no wealth on earth could buy him the revenge he sought.
I was going to win. I knew that now. I was on the road to victory and nothing could turn me back.
My knowledge transformed me, and as I watched the dawn break over Mallingham Broad I began to plan with exhilaration how my great victory over Cornelius would be waged and won.
III
The fire would have to look like an accident, of course. I did not want to risk a possible charge of arson by destroying a house that wasn’t legally mine. However, Cornelius would know the fire was no accident; that was the glory of the scheme. He would know it but he would never be able to prove it, and for the rest of his life he would live with the knowledge that although he owned some charred acres in Norfolk, he had never owned and would never own any part of me.
I am unsure when I remembered Alan’s wireless with its dangerous flex. It must have been at some point during breakfast, because when I had finished my coffee—I could still eat nothing—I went to his room and found the wireless on the table. Tucked in the coiled flex was a note which read: “Mother—don’t forget, please!”
Yet I had forgotten. It was almost as if I had known I was going to need the wireless, but of course I couldn’t have known.
I plugged in the flex and waited. After ten minutes I could smell the burning as the flex began to smolder. Turning off the wireless immediately, I unplugged it again, destroyed Alan’s note and took the wireless to my upstairs sitting room.
Then I went downstairs to talk to Nanny and Mrs. Oakes.
“I think it would be better if you took George away to the West Country now that the Germans are almost at the French coast,” I said briskly to Nanny. “Lady Harriet has already offered to lend me her cottage at Croyde Bay, and I’ll telephone her now to make sure it’s still available. Can you be ready by two, do you think? I can drive you to Norwich to get the London train.”
And to Mrs. Oakes I said gently, “I’ve decided to close Mallingham for a while and send George and Nanny to Devon. Would you and Mr. Oakes mind terribly if you went to Mary a little earlier than usual this year? I can see you onto the Yarmouth train this afternoon.”
Fortunately the parlormaid and the housemaids were all local women,
so I simply paid them a month’s wages and said I would continue to pay them while the house was closed. I was between cooks at the time, so I had no other staff to worry about.
Then I spoke to George.
“Georgie, you’re going to have a lovely holiday by the sea. I won’t be able to come with you at first, but I’ll join you and Nanny later.”
“Can I take my jabberwocky?”
“Yes, of course, darling.”
“And a lollipop for the train?”
“Definitely a lollipop.”
He was satisfied. I kissed the top of his dark head, and finally waved him goodbye as his train drew out of Norwich station soon afternoon.
I was alone at Mallingham by the end of the afternoon.
I started to pack the things I would need for my visit to London. I thought it would be best if I went through the motions of going to meet Cornelius even though I had no intention of presenting myself at Lincoln’s Inn; it would look better afterwards if there was an inquiry. I decided I would stay at Harriet’s house, plead illness and at the last moment cancel the appointment. Later when Cornelius was declaring that his patience was exhausted I would write him a note to say I was still considering his offer, and he would storm off to Mallingham to find nothing but ashes. The Hall was secluded and some way from the village. Someone would eventually be certain to see the house burning, but with luck no one would know when the fire had started and I would have an alibi of sorts.
I wanted to pack every one of my photographs, but I knew that would be unwise, for if investigators found I had salvaged my most precious possessions they would naturally be suspicious. But I took my favorite photographs of Paul and Steve and put them into my suitcase.
It was a long night. I slept a little, but most of the time I was wandering around from room to room. Sometimes I wondered if I were sleepwalking, because my dreams seemed to blend with reality until I was no longer sure what was truth and what was fantasy. The walls of time seemed to have disappeared. I was with Paul and Steve—how odd it was to see them together at Mallingham!—but other people were there too, my father and his father and strangers whom I did not recognize. But they all knew me and they were so proud of me, I could see their smiles, and when the dawn came, the last dawn Mallingham would ever see, I was in the courtyard by the medieval walls of the hall, and Godfrey Slade was riding off to the Crusade to fight for his beliefs against the vast power of the Saracen. I tried to talk to him but he spoke a language I did not understand, and although I knew I could communicate with him in Latin the Latin words were beyond my grasp. And then Paul was there again, quoting the love poetry of Catullus, and above us the sky was so brilliantly blue that I could only marvel, What a wonderful summer!
The Rich Are Different Page 86
