by John Pearson
“James, my precious James,” she said. “What an extraordinarily presentable English gentleman you seem to have become.”
She was extremely self-assured. Lucy was now a pretty teen-age girl, uncannily like Marjorie as a child, and there were two other children too—Richard, aged ten, and seven-year-old Marjorie Elizabeth.
“It’s just like coming home,” said James. And home it was for him throughout the months he spent in New York. The apartment was enormous, and Dana Wallace would not hear of James’s living anywhere but there. Wallace was a hearty, healthy, solidly successful man now in his middle forties. Since the war, he had moved from his law firm into a firm of Wall Street brokers, and had already made a killing. Shares were booming, life was very, very good.
“Why don’t you stay out here and make your fortune?” he asked James.
“Perhaps I might at that,” said James.
And so he did. Helped by his brother-in-law he transferred his capital from London to New York, and then invested heavily in railroads and steel-mills, commodities and utilities, chemical firms and shipyards.
“America is working for you now,” said Dana Wallace. “You can’t go wrong.”
But for James there was far more to America than a fortune—important though that was. It spelled a brand-new view of life, an end to the worn-out philosophies of Europe, a chance to start again. He even felt that he had roots here, thanks to Elizabeth and to a long-legged blonde called Regine Dollamore. Her father was a banker. She was twenty-two. For the first time in what seemed like a century to him, James fell in love.
It was a very brief affair, but perfect in its way. Regine seemed quite unlike any other girl he’d known. She was straightforward, clever, and had violet eyes. They spent part of that autumn in Vermont. When he told her he was going back to England, he promised he’d be back and marry her. And so he would have done.
That spring in England everyone saw the change in him and was delighted.
“Well, Virginia,” he said on his first night back in Eaton Place, “you were quite right as usual. America has done the trick.”
“It certainly would seem so by the look of you,” she said. “You look ten years younger. I was getting just a little worried for you, James.”
He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Well, there was no need, was there, dearest stepmother. The prodigal is back, and younger and much richer than he’s ever been before. How’s Father?”
“Wonderful. Still caught up with his old League of Nations, but it suits him. He’s thrilled about Georgina, as we all are.”
“Georgina? What’s happened to Georgina?”
“Didn’t you get our letter? She’s engaged. To a duke’s son, too. Young Robert Stockbridge, such a nice uncomplicated fellow.”
“Good Lord alive! Not Bobby? He’s all right, but our Georgina’s going to meet her match with her future ma-in-law. The Duchess is a Tartar.”
“We know that, but Georgina’s quite a strong-willed girl—as you may remember. The Duchess may have met her match.”
For Richard, that evening of his son’s return was one of the happiest he remembered. James was so full of life and confidence. His stories of Elizabeth and of the girl he had met, his sheer excitement about New York, seemed to have cured him for good of all the gloom and bitterness he had carried since the war. Only one thing worried Richard as he spoke to him that night. Money.
“From the way you talk, James, you’d think you’d just discovered it,” he said.
“Well, Father, in a way I have. Until you actually see Wall Street for yourself you’ve no idea of the power of money. Why, if you’re smart you can make your fortune almost overnight. It’s not like the City. It’s exciting. You must get Dana Wallace to invest for you. It would suit you to be a genuine capitalist after all these years.”
“No thanks, my boy. I’m quite all right. But one thing puzzles me, you know. With all this money being made, doesn’t anybody ever lose?”
“Lose, Father? Why, of course not. That’s impossible.”
“Why?” Richard asked.
Other people were asking Richard’s question—and becoming more and more unhappy with the answer. As the disquiet spread, the market melted like a bowl of jelly on a summer’s day. And as the market melted, so did James’s happiness. It was as simple and as cruel as that.
There was a lot of drama, naturally—especially in New York—but when the great Wall Street crash hit Eaton Place it did its damage with a sort of studied calm. It was all very English, very stoical, but no less painful for that.
James seemed to take it very well. His training on the Western Front, those dreadful losses he had witnessed with his men, must have accustomed him to the reality of losing. Also he was a gentleman—and gentlemen don’t get worked up when their world collapses. All he said that morning when he heard the first news of the Wall Street slide was, “Dashed rum!” And as the day went by and it was made increasingly clear to him that he’d lost everything, he was still very calm.
He was apologetic to Georgina. He had been promising her a splendid wedding, one that would put the Duchess in her place. Now it seemed quite impossible, but she was not to worry. Something would turn up. Father would find a way. He always did.
The only point at which James appeared to falter was when Rose came to ask about her savings, which he had just invested for her. He was sorry, but they had gone as well. Rose said she was sorry too (although the loss spelled out the end of all her dreams of a house, an end to drudgery, a secure old age. She too was very English and a perfect lady.
Richard was the only one who failed to observe the niceties of the occasion, and then he only did it on poor Rose’s account.
“How could you have stooped so low as to take money from a servant to invest?” he stormed at James. “Aren’t you ashamed? Don’t you feel degraded to have robbed the poor girl who trusted you?”
It was no reply for James to say that Rose had begged him to invest the money, that he had acted in good faith, that had the market held, Rose would have been extremely rich. James had broken an accepted code. He had to pay the penalty.
For the rest of his life Richard reproached himself for speaking as he had to James, but as Virginia kept telling him, it really made no difference. From the moment Wall Street crashed, James, being James, was finished. He had no chance of getting back to the good life in New York. He had no hope of ever seeing his long-legged blonde with violet eyes again. He had no possibility of surviving in a bleak, cold world without those pleasant things that make it bearable.
Money had made him what he was. Lack of it now destroyed him.
So, in a way, it hardly mattered how his end reached him, and as Virginia kept saying afterwards, Richard’s words could have played no part in making him take his gun and drive to Henley on that spring afternoon. And when he booked into the hotel, lay on the bed and shot himself, he was just doing what he had seen so many times before in France. He knew what he was up to.
What made it easier for Richard to bear was that he too had really acted like a gentleman. His outburst—such as it was—had been on behalf of Rose, a servant. He had refrained, most scrupulously refrained, from reproaching James in any way for what he had done to them all. For by gambling and going broke, James had effectively banished the Bellamys from Eaton Place for good. It had been Southwold money which had brought them there and kept them there. Now it was gone—and they would go as well.
Georgina had her wedding. Virginia paid for that. And Richard had sufficient income now to live quite comfortably in Wiltshire. He was even able to help Angus Hudson and Mrs. Bridges open their boarding house when they married and went to live in Broadstairs. Rose went with the Bellamys to Wiltshire, where they found a small Queen Anne house with an orchard and a view of rolling country. It was not far from Southwold.
A Note on the Author
John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King’s College School and then Cambridge, where he read hi
story.
In the early years of his career he worked on various newspapers including The Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times – on which he was an assistant to Ian Fleming. He would go on to write the first biography of Ian Fleming in 1966.
Pearson would also become the third official James Bond author of the adult Bond series with his first-person biography of the fictional agent, James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007.
Discover books by John Pearson published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JohnPearson
Arena
Biggles
Bloody Royal
Crusader in Pink
Edward the Rake
Facades
Painfully Rich
The Bellamy Saga
The Life of Ian Fleming
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill
The Ultimate Family
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1976 by Praeger Publishers
Copyright © 1976 John Pearson
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eISBN: 9781448210725
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