The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  Dinah showed me into the great hall, and there I saw the hammer-beamed ceiling and the staircase which had once led to the solar, and the fireplace with the stone carving above the mantel of the coat of arms of Godfrey Slade. This first recorded Slade of Mallingham had built the present hall before riding off to the Crusades. It was thought that he had been the son of a rich Norwich merchant who had aspired to grandeur by buying the hall when the previous owners, the monks of St. Benet’s Abbey, had sold the property to meet increased taxation.

  “This way,” said Dinah, but I was still looking up at the hammer-beamed ceiling, and it was several seconds before I followed her into the far wing where a large chamber had been furnished as a drawing room. A modern architect had built some doors which opened onto a terrace, and as Dinah led the way outside I looked past the Victorian urns decorating the balustrade, down the lawn studded with croquet hoops, to the Edwardian boathouse, the jetty and the shining waters of Mallingham Broad.

  The glare of the sun on water hurt my eyes. I closed my lids, and as I stood listening I heard the birds calling to one another in the marshes and the salt sea wind humming through the willows at the water’s edge.

  Again I felt the past opening up before me, but it was a different past, a past I had never experienced before. In my mind’s eye I could see it stretching backward into the mist, layer upon layer, time beyond time, time out of mind, and its vastness was not disturbing but comforting to me.

  I opened my eyes and walked down the lawn to the water. The walls of time were very thin, and as I walked I became aware of the endless past merging with my own present, and I knew I had come to the end of my journey sideways in time. A great peace overcame me. Tears blurred my eyes, for I knew I was free at last with the blood washed from my hands, free of the prison I had built for myself in another time and in another world far away across the sea.

  The sense of having come home was overpowering. “This is what I’ve always wanted,” my voice said. “This is what I’ve always been trying to find.”

  I turned. She was there. We looked at each other for a long moment and then she smiled.

  “Welcome to my world, Paul,” said Dinah Slade.

  Four

  I

  “WHAT ABOUT YOUR ENTOURAGE?”

  “They can wait.”

  We went upstairs. Her room faced the Broad, and from the window one could see beyond the trees which fringed the water to the Brograve Level and the sandhills of Waxham. After drawing the drapes I turned to find her waiting for me in the fourposter bed.

  Awaking later, I went back to the window and lifted the corner of the drape. The sun was still high in the sky although it was early evening, and the birds were still skimming languidly over the mirrored surface of the Broad. Yet the light had changed. The reeds were darker, the water a deeper blue, and far away beyond the sandhills I could imagine a golden sheen beginning to form on the restless waves of the North Sea.

  I dressed. The girl was sound asleep, her long lashes motionless against her cheeks. After watching her for a moment I went downstairs to the hall.

  O’Reilly was waiting for me. He was sitting neatly in an armchair by the door and reading a guidebook on the Norfolk Broads.

  “Is everything in order?”

  “Yes, sir. We have our accommodation in the west wing. It’s rather primitive by American standards,” said O’Reilly fastidiously, “but I’m sure we’ll manage. I’ve arranged for us to take our meals at the village inn. There are no servants here except for one old woman who appears to be deaf, hostile and a mental defective.”

  “Ah, that must be Mrs. Oakes.” I was remembering Dinah’s report. Twenty years ago when there had still been money in the family, six in-help, three daily maids, two grooms, two gardeners and a gamekeeper had been employed at Mallingham Hall, but nowadays the head gardener and the housekeeper, Mr. and Mrs. Oakes, had the servants’ quarters to themselves. Mrs. Oakes had looked after Dinah when she had returned to Mallingham after her mother’s death, and still regarded herself as responsible for running the house. Her husband, who had a Boer War pension, still assumed responsibility for the garden. Neither had been paid since Dinah’s father had died. An old marshman who lived in a hut on the edge of the Broad kept out trespassers, guarded the wildlife and fished the waters to prevent overpopulation among trout, bream and tench.

  The house was dusty and down-at-heel. Most of the first editions had long since been sold from the library; most of the antique furniture had also gone to pay for Harry Slade’s extravagance. The rooms were furnished in a hodgepodge of styles; the walls needed a coat of paint; the evidence of mice was everywhere. I had learned that there was one bathroom, one water closet, no telephone, no electricity and no gas. It was not a large house, a mere five bedrooms in each wing of the medieval H, and the galleried hall was bigger than either wing. The kitchens were primitive, the stables little better than ruins, the greenhouses broken and overgrown. There was no yacht in the boathouse, only a sailing dinghy, and a sole pony occupied the stall next to the Victorian trap. Beyond the stables the fifteen-foot walls enclosed an area of three acres, most of which was grass. I was shown a paddock for the pony, a rectangle which could be marked as a tennis court, and the croquet lawn below the back terrace. Once the Manor of Mallingham had embraced an area of several hundred acres, including the church, the village and all the farms in the neighborhood, but in the past fifty years the farms and cottages had been sold, so that all that now remained of the estate was the house, the garden and the seventy-five acres of water, reeds and marsh which formed Mallingham Broad.

  “But I shall make it live again,” said Dinah as we dined that evening. “Oh, not in the old way, of course—that’s gone forever. I don’t expect to be the lady of the manor living on the rents of my tenants. But if—when—I make enough money at my business I’ll restore the house and grounds and there’ll be a yacht in the boathouse again and a motor car instead of that dilapidated old pony trap, and servants to look after the house properly, and antiques to replace the ones my father sold. And I’ll stock the library with valuable books again, and everything will be as perfect as it was two hundred years ago when William Slade was a member of Parliament and the Slades were a great Norfolk family. Mrs. Oakes, do stop looking as though the Day of Judgment were about to dawn! I can’t tell you how depressing I find it!”

  The old woman had just brought in the summer pudding. “No good was ever a-coming out of foreigners stroaming about these parts, Miss Dinah,” she said, taking care not to look in my direction.

  “And to think I put on my best English accent!” I said ruefully as she marched out of the room.

  “Oh, never mind her—she doesn’t even trust anyone from Suffolk.”

  When we had finished our meal we went for a stroll in the garden. The Broad was golden, flocks of starlings and lapwings flew over the marshes across the pale evening sky, and a bittern was booming far off in the reeds.

  “Would you like to see my laboratory?” suggested Dinah.

  “About as much as you wanted to see the Rouen Apocalypse.”

  We paused among the shrubbery. I wondered if Mrs. Oakes was watching in disapproval from some hidden window.

  “I actually use the scullery as a laboratory,” Dinah explained as she led the way into a greenhouse which had a number of panes missing from the roof. “I need running water for my experiments, but I store the results of my work here so that Mrs. Oakes doesn’t throw them away.” She moved to a bench which had been cleared of horticultural impedimenta, removed a tarpaulin and revealed a row of bottles confusingly labeled with such instructions as “Percy’s cough syrup: one teaspoon every four hours.”

  Dinah’s paternal grandparents had lived in India, and on their return to England they had brought with them the Indian nursemaid who had cared for their infant son. The ayah had remained for twenty years in England before dying of homesickness, and it had been her recipes for cosmetics, conscientiously recorded
for posterity by Dinah’s grandmother, that had formed the basis of Dinah’s experiments.

  “The ayah amended the original Indian recipes herself because of the difficulties of getting the ingredients she had used in India,” Dinah explained. “Of course she used only natural ingredients and each phial took an eternity to prepare, but the perfumes are so good that I was determined to find the formulae which would create the same scents artificially. I’m going to start with perfumes first, as I told you in my report. The preparations for skin care are all simple variations on a glycerin base, but the secret is to get the texture right and the scent perfect. Here—smell this,” she added, thrusting under my nose a bottle labeled “For Back-Ache.”

  I had expected to be reminded of the exotic East, but instead I thought of an English garden at sunset on a summer evening. “Lavender?” I murmured. “No, too musky. Roses? No, not quite. What is it?”

  “A mixture of eighteen scents including nutmeg, magnolia, myrrh and sweet pea. Now try this.”

  I sniffed. At first the perfume seemed identical. I sniffed again and realized it was sweeter and more cloying. “I don’t like that so much,” I said.

  She was unsurprised. Replacing the bottle, she selected a third. “What about this?”

  I put my nose obediently to the rim and was once more back in the English garden. But this time I could see the woods at the edge of the lawn, the leaves on the trees, the moss on the ground. “I like that,” I said, sniffing again. “You’ve caught the scent of flowers, but now it’s overlaid with something else.”

  “Would you say it was a natural scent?”

  “Without question.”

  She smiled. “The only natural ingredients are the herbs, which are cheap and easy to produce. The rest is a chemical compound.” She picked up the first bottle. “This is the scent made entirely from natural ingredients, including flowers which are expensive and impossible to obtain all the year round. I couldn’t market it as a commercial proposition. This”—she turned to the second bottle—” is the scent which contains nothing but chemicals. The result is similar, but I’ve never been able to get rid of that cloying sweetness without adding the herbs. They disguise it, though I’m not sure how.”

  I wanted to make sure I had understood her correctly. “Give me an example.”

  “Well, for instance, it’s easy to make an artificial lemon scent. You use glycerin, chloroform, nitrous ether, aldehyde, acetate of ethyl, butyrate of amyl, alcohol and a couple of other chemicals. But you’ll know it’s an artificial scent unless you blend it with some natural ingredients. Conversely, many synthetic products often intensify the odors of the natural products, so if you get the right combination your product can be even better than a scent which is made entirely without chemical ingredients.”

  The idea of man improving on nature always appeals to my basest nineteenth-century instincts. I asked what artificial scents could be used.

  “The most important are ionone, for violet perfume, and terpineol, for lilac, and …” She talked on knowledgeably, and I learned of essential oils dissolved in alcohol, of pomades and tinctures, of liquid perfume and dry perfume.

  “And here’s my recipe for Indian sachet powder: three and a half ounces of sandalwood, ten and a half ounces of cinnamon, thirty grams of cloves …”

  The exotic formulas filled a thick exercise book, but at last we descended from the heights of perfumery to the prosaic instructions for making vanishing cream.

  “Four pounds twelve ounces of stearic acid—white triple-pressed …”

  The list rolled sonorously on. I imagined a million women smoothing their faces with the contents of a million jars of vanishing cream, and soon the landscape surrounding them became dotted with dollars and cents.

  “And the chemicals are all easy to obtain,” Dinah was saying. “Of course, you have to be careful of adulteration, so your supplier must be quite above suspicion.” And she began to explain how one could recognize the adulterates of essential oils.

  “… so they add paraffin or spermaceti to make the mixture congeal readily, because that’s characteristic of true oil of aniseed,” she concluded earnestly. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely.” I mentally allocated another fifty thousand dollars for further expansion and pictured a future public company launched by a flotation designed to seduce even the most cautious investor. It was only when we went indoors and she showed me her packaging designs that I realized how far she had to travel before I could risk making her small business a public enterprise. Glancing at the fanciful gold, lettering which curved bewilderingly against a pale-blue background, I forgot my vision of a million-dollar annual turnover and came down to earth with a jolt.

  “Very pretty,” I said, “but I can’t read it. I guess this flowered script is supposed to conjure up an Indian atmosphere.”

  “Exactly!” said Dinah in triumph. “I’m calling my product Taj Mahal.”

  I groaned.

  “Well, why not?” she demanded angrily.

  “My dear, your purchasers among the ill-educated proletariat are never even going to be able to pronounce the name, let alone understand the allusion to India.”

  “But I’m not catering to the proletariat! I’m catering to all those upper-class women who have until now been inhibited from using cosmetics and who can afford to pay for their new fashion through the nose!”

  “Then you’re out of touch with the economic facts of 1922. I have no doubt you could make a shilling or two peddling paste to the aristocracy, but if you want to give me a reasonable return for my money you’ll cater to the masses. England is ripe for mass production; that’s where the money is and that’s where I’m putting my capital.” I stacked her sketches together and handed them back to her. “Change the coloring. Gold is hard to read, and although I like the blue it’s too pale to create a strong impression. I’ll bring over a market-research team from New York to decide which colors would create the most sales impact.” I began to roam around the room just as I did when I was dictating, and allowed my mind to fasten wholly on the problem. “Scrap the fancy lettering— have firm strong capital letters which everyone can read. Scrap the name Taj Mahal. You want a name which sounds like the virginal heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. Let me see. What were all those Trollope women called? Lily, Belle, Glencora—”

  “I am not calling my product after some bally awful Victorian heroine!”

  “Then let’s think of something classical. Why, of course! Diana! That’s it! Diana Slade—very pretty and elegant, much more charming than your real name. We’ll call the firm Diana Slade Cosmetics, and you can name your perfumes after the different goddesses of antiquity!”

  “But what’s that got to do with India?” stormed Dinah.

  “Absolutely nothing, but who cares so long as the product sells?”

  “I care! I care, you beastly, vulgar, money-grubbing American!”

  I swung around in surprise but fortunately managed not to laugh. After considering my approach I avoided all apologies and said instead, “Dinah, when I was a young man, a little younger than you are now, I arrived home penniless in New York with a pregnant wife and had to earn my living. I had a bogus Oxford accent, a love of the classics and a passionate distaste for vulgarity. However, it didn’t take me long to discover that those dubious virtues were of no use to me when it came to surviving in a town like New York. I learned to survive in a hard school, Dinah. I just hope your course in the art of survival will be easier than mine was.”

  There was a pause before she said unevenly, “I’m sorry. I was only shocked by how suddenly you changed into a fast-talking, utterly twentieth-century businessman complete with a pronounced American accent.”

  This time I did laugh. “I warned you I was a New Yorker! You didn’t think I made my money by declaiming poetry by Catullus, did you? But maybe I should start quoting again to reassure you that Dr. Jekyll isn’t entirely Mr. Hyde. ‘Viva-mus, mea Lesbia, a
tque amemus—’ ”

  “ ‘—da mi basia mille!’ ” responded Dinah promptly, raising her mouth to mine for a kiss, and as I slid my arms around her waist I couldn’t help thinking that she really was the most remarkable girl. …

  II

  The next morning after breakfast we went sailing. I had already decided to stay an extra night in Norfolk so that on the following day I could call on the Slade family lawyers in Norwich to discuss the purchase of the estate. There would have to be an independent valuation, but I thought that in view of the dilapidated state of the house and the lack of modern conveniences I should be able to make the purchase cheaply.

  By that time London seemed as remote as New York. Deciding firmly that I would not think of any business for the next twenty-four hours, I hoisted the sail of the little dinghy, and with Dinah at the tiller we set off across Mallingham Broad.

  I had never sailed at Newport, because it was felt that the motion might disturb my health, but later when it seemed I had outgrown my illness I learned about yachting during summers spent at Bar Harbor, Maine. Sailing was not my favorite sport but I enjoyed it, and I had never enjoyed it more than I did on that Sunday morning early in June when Dinah’s little boat danced over the waters of Mallingham Broad. From the water my perception of the landscape altered. I could see the “Isle de Mallingham,” the slight rise in the ground on which the village had been built, and found it easy to imagine the area as part of some ancient inland sea. Unfamiliar birds watched us from the reeds. In the clear water below the prow I glimpsed the flash of small fish and once saw the shadow of a pike lurking in the depths. I was soon longing for a rod, and when I asked Dinah if the fish were fair-sized she laughed and began to talk of trout weighing thirty-five pounds.