The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  “And I feel that your attitude is unspeakably arrogant!” bawled Dinah, almost in tears at being put in her place so brutally. “And your patronizing contempt not only shortsighted but self-defeating! How dare you talk to me like that! You’d never dare if I were a man!”

  It was no use. I could sustain my stern expression no longer. “Is this a prelude to some delightful suffragette panegyric?” I inquired with a smile, but if I thought I was pouring oil on troubled waters I was gravely mistaken.

  “And how dare you call me a suffragette!” blazed Dinah, tears forgotten as she gave vent to a rage that seemed entirely out of proportion to my mild remark. “I’m no certifiable political fanatic! I’m a woman who has to work for a living, and I think I should be treated with respect and not regarded patronizingly as a second-rate citizen of the world!”

  “I’m perfectly willing to give you my total respect,” I said equably, “but you must earn it. It’s no good throwing scenes just because I threaten you with an American business manager. While you behave like a child I shall treat you as a child, and I would do so whatever sex you happened to be, male, female or hermaphrodite. Now grow up, wise up and shut up. Shall we go to bed?”

  There was a hideous silence. I was just thinking in despair that she would burst into tears and keep us both up all night when she delighted me as usual by doing the unexpected. She giggled. “I do so love American slang!” she said. “Perhaps an American business manager could teach me something after all.”

  “Allow me to continue your education until he arrives. …”

  We went to bed. It was the best night we had ever had together. I fell asleep toying with the idea of taking the rest of the week off and motoring to Mallingham directly after our visit to Lincoln’s Inn.

  The next morning I had to admit that this idea was impossible, but I thought that after Hal Beecher arrived I might be able to escape more frequently from London. I could have a month of long weekends at Mallingham and still be back in New York by the end of July, or perhaps early August. The thought of New York in August made me shudder. August was one of the months we always spent at Bar Harbor, but how much pleasanter it would be to stay at Mallingham! Perhaps if I wrote to Sylvia and said I had decided to take my summer vacation in Europe … But then I would really have to ask her to join me. No, there was no alternative. I had to be home by the last week in July, review matters at Willow and Wall and retire as usual to Maine with my wife.

  That weekend I returned to Mallingham.

  I had to work all day on Saturday, but at seven o’clock I set off north along the Newmarket Road, and by midnight I was back in North Norfolk. I found the candles lit in the dining room, cold roast fowl and home-baked bread on the table, and Dinah, looking vaguely Dickensian in a long black gown, waiting to receive me.

  “The champagne is chilling in Mallingham Broad,” she said after we had kissed, and we went down to the boathouse to pull up the bottle. On an impulse I suggested a moonlight sail, but since the dinghy threatened to capsize when we made love we returned to the house to complete our reunion.

  Later I brought her back to London with me and we went to the theater. We saw the outstanding event of the summer season, a revival of Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and discussed Gladys Cooper’s performance ad nauseam; we saw a new Edna Best comedy, which I disliked; and we spent many happy hours wrangling over the significance of the works of George Bernard Shaw. Tiring at last of such lightweight intellectual activity, we turned to the season’s sporting events. I took a thirty-guinea box at Royal Ascot and we saw the fabled horse Gold Myth win both the Gold Vase and the Gold Cup.

  However, it was not until the end of June that Dinah’s name appeared in the press, for the English gossip columns, few in number, purveyed only innocent items heavily swathed in discretion. We had motored down to Wimbledon where the lawn tennis championships were due to begin on the New Ground, and although rain fell almost continuously the Ground was opened at half-past three when the King himself graciously struck a gong three times in the royal box. Because of the presence of royalty I hardly expected anyone to notice us, but some enterprising journalist recognized me and asked O’Reilly for the name of the lady at my side. Knowing I was never averse to a quick mention in the press, O’Reilly disclosed Dinah’s identity.

  The next morning he gave me the Daily Graphic’s report of the events at Wimbledon. Under the subheading “Famous People Among Spectators” it was stated that Mr. Paul C. Van Zale, the well-known American millionaire, had been present at the New Ground with Miss Dinah Slade.

  I thought such a discreet little mention could hardly have given offense to anyone, but I had reckoned without the English horror of publicity.

  “How vulgar!” exclaimed Dinah, dropping the paper with a shudder. “And dangerous too. Supposing our affair turns into a huge scandal and rebounds against us!”

  “I can’t think why it should. We conduct ourselves decently in public and behave before the servants. What more do the British expect of their aristocracy?”

  The very next day young Geoffrey Hurst traveled from Norwich to London to answer my question.

  IV

  I was still more occupied at the office than I had anticipated. Hal Beecher had arrived from New York, and although I had at first regarded his arrival as my passport to greater leisure I soon discovered I was more thoroughly chained to the office than ever. Hal was a good fellow and more than willing to become a merchant banker in London instead of an investment banker in New York, but the terminology was not the only difference between the two jobs, and to put it kindly, it is not always easy to teach an old dog new tricks. I was in the middle of putting him through his paces on the morning after Dinah’s debut in the Daily Graphic when Geoffrey Hurst arrived without an appointment and demanded an audience.

  “I’m sure you won’t want to see him, sir,” said O’Reilly, “but since he’s a friend of Miss Slade’s I thought I should tell you he’s here before I sent him away.”

  “As usual, O’Reilly, you did the right thing. Tell him to wait.” By that time I was almost gasping to have a break from Hal. We had spent over an hour discussing the English laws on disclosure as outlined in the Companies (Consolidation) Act of 1908, and Hal was still marveling at the English taste for regulation. In America we can peddle securities more or less as we like so long as we maintain a vague respect for the loose “blue-sky” laws operating in certain states, but then in America the concept of the freedom of the individual is so inflated that even laws protecting its citizens from investing in fraudulent securities are regarded as infringements on the right of men to throw away their money as they choose.

  “I’ll see the boy now,” I told O’Reilly five minutes later, after Hal had been dispatched with a cup of coffee to browse among the complex clauses of the act.

  Geoffrey Hurst swept into the room with the air of a Crusader blazing into battle against the Saracen.

  “Sit down, Mr. Hurst,” I said, seeing at once how the land lay and not making the mistake of offering him a hand to shake. “I’m delighted to see you again—how kind of you to call! How is your father?”

  “Very well, thank you, sir, but I didn’t come here to discuss him. I came here to tell you—”

  “May I offer you coffee? Or tea?”

  “No, thank you, sir. I came here to tell you that your beastly rotten behavior has gone too far and that you have absolutely no right to drag Dinah with you into the columns of the gutter press!”

  “I didn’t know you read the gutter press, Mr. Hurst, and besides I suspect the Daily Graphic might well find such a description slanderous. However, I have no wish to quarrel with you.”

  “Well, I’ve every intention of quarreling with you!”

  “Oh dear.” I regarded him sympathetically. He was such a nice-looking boy and so well brought up. I wondered if he had known he was in love with Dinah before I arrived on the scene, but thought not. He had the anguished air of a man who ha
s discovered a fundamental truth in life too late to do anything about it.

  “You’ve taken advantage of Dinah, you’ve corrupted her …” The predictable tirade continued for some minutes while I listened patiently and allowed my glance to wander over the objects on my desk. I suddenly noticed that my calendar was set at the twenty-eighth, and with a jolt remembered that the twenty-ninth was my wedding anniversary. Seizing a pencil, I hastily scribbled “Cable Sylvia” on my memo pad.

  “And how dare you attend to business matters while I’m talking to you!” yelled the boy in a towering rage, and jumping to his feet he tried to sweep the pad off the desk.

  I shot out a hand, grabbed his wrist so tightly that he squealed, and shoved him back into his chair.

  “Behave yourself, Mr. Hurst,” I said shortly. “Your conduct is unbecoming in a gentleman.”

  Evidently I had selected the appropriate English phrase, for he lapsed at once into a stunned silence. As his shattered expression continued I said without any special emphasis, “Your quarrel is not with me but with Dinah. In my own way I’m trying to look after her. It may not be your way, but that doesn’t mean I’m not well-intentioned. I wish to correct you on one detail: I did not seduce Dinah. She seduced me, very deliberately and with her eyes wide open, and if you look back at your personal memories of the incident with the hamper I think your natural honesty will force you to acknowledge I’m speaking the truth. Whether her private conduct is any of your business is not for me to say, although I strongly suspect it is not. You’re not her brother or even her cousin, although perhaps you once had some private understanding with her that I know nothing about. If this is true I can only apologize, plead my ignorance and repeat that your quarrel is with her and not with me. If it’s not true, then I believe I’m perfectly entitled to Dinah’s affections if she chooses to bestow them on me.”

  “But Dinah doesn’t know what she’s doing! After all, she’s only a girl—”

  “Mr. Hurst, you may regard women as mental defectives. I don’t. Dinah is twenty-one years old and she knows exactly what she’s doing. If she were a man her decision to seek capital to start a business and save her home would be entirely commendable. If she were a man her decision to lose her virginity and embark on a love affair would also be regarded as natural—even healthy. Just because she’s a woman should she be expected to give up her home, her potential career and her private life in order to fulfill some-illogical masculine concept of how a woman should behave?”

  He stared at me. By providing him with a novel idea I had at least succeeded in calming him down. Finally he said with a touching naïveté, “Do you mean you approve of emancipated women?”

  “Good God, no, I’m a man! Why should I want to alter a world that suits us all so well?”

  He did not hear the irony in my voice. “But you just said—”

  “Didn’t they teach you in law school to argue a case from both sides?”

  He nodded, fascinated. “I always thought Dinah would turn out like her mother,” he commented at last. “She always swore she wouldn’t, but now I can see she has.”

  This was the first interesting remark he had made. “Dinah’s mother was an emancipated woman?” I said quickly.

  “Oh, didn’t she tell you? She was a suffragette who got arrested and died in prison. Actually she died of tetanus—her throat was damaged during the forcible feeding and an infection set in.”

  “Mr. Hurst,” I interrupted with my most hospitable smile, “may I offer you a little glass of madeira?”

  He drank three glasses of madeira while I gently milked him of information. When I had gathered enough details to make O’Reilly’s file on Dinah Slade bulge at the seams, I rose to my feet, smiled regretfully and said that I really did have to return to my work.

  “So nice of you to stop by,” I murmured, taking his hand and pressing it fondly. “Do give my warmest regards to your father, won’t you?”

  He said he would. I suspect he did not remember his rage until O’Reilly had escorted him from the building, and I wryly pictured him gnashing his young teeth all the way home to Norwich.

  He was a nice boy, but he had a lot to learn.

  V

  “I’ll shoot Geoffrey when I next see him,” said Dinah.

  “That would be not only tiresome but unoriginal. Why are you so ashamed of your mother? You needn’t be ashamed of her with me! I always admired the suffragettes. Such ambition! And such an eye for publicity! They deserved to get what they wanted.”

  “I despise misplaced idealism! They would have got what they wanted sooner if they hadn’t antagonized every man in sight. All this women’s-emancipation nonsense makes me ill, it’s so trivial. The real issue of the modern world is the struggle between socialism and capitalism, and it would make a lot more sense if women fought for a doctrine which declared that all people should be equal.”

  “But if you fight for a political doctrine, doesn’t it help to have a vote?”

  “Oh, you think you’re so clever! I’m sorry, but I can’t regard my mother as a heroine. I think she wasted her life and died a fool, and if I were religious I’d go down on my knees each night and pray that the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. I refuse to discuss my mother, I refuse to discuss emancipation and I absolutely refuse to think it’s heroic to throw away one’s life without a damned good reason.”

  I saw at once that her mother’s desertion, even though it had been involuntary, had had an effect from which she had still not recovered, and to deflect the conversation toward less painful subjects I said lightly, “Talking of heroic idealism, have you ever read Tennyson’s poem ‘The Revenge’?”

  She was her old self again in a flash. “Paul,” she said laughing, “if you mention that wretched Victorian doggerel-peddler to me one more time I shall scream! Yes, I believe I was forced to read it once at school. I detest poems glorifying war.”

  “Ah, but ‘The Revenge’ isn’t really about war at all. It’s about romance and idealism and all the other qualities which the War has made unfashionable. Read it sometime when you’re so jaded you have nothing else to do but sneer at the world,” I advised her good-humoredly, and remembering my earlier promise I bought her an anthology of Tennyson’s poetry with the intention of giving it to her as a parting present. However, I was still not sure when I was going home. Realizing that I would have to stay longer with Hal than I had anticipated, I had written to Sylvia to tell her I would join her in Maine in mid-August but I was seriously thinking of staying in England until early September. A little yachting vacation on the Norfolk Broads was a very tempting prospect.

  Meanwhile my weekends at Mallingham were becoming steadily longer, and on the twenty-ninth of July, the day I had originally planned to sail home, I was tacking across Horsey Mere with Dinah once again and thinking how infinitely preferable it was to be in a dinghy on the Norfolk Broads than in a liner on Southampton Water.

  We concluded our traditional walk to the sea, took our traditional stroll along the beach and retreated to our traditional hollow. “What a rut we’re sinking into!” I said to Dinah as I started to undress her.

  I had not made love to her for several days for the usual reasons, and I had not made love to her in broad daylight for almost two weeks. Dinah had unexpectedly developed a preference for drawing the drapes when we retired to her room during the day, and on our previous visit to the sandhills a party of naturalists had inconveniently decided to conduct a bird-watching session within peeking distance of our favorite hollow.

  “Remember those awful people on the beach last time?” said Dinah, pulling me close to her.

  “Vividly. Aren’t you going to take off any more clothes?”

  “I’m cold.” She shivered unconvincingly and added as I tried to ignore the complaint, “No, honestly, Paul, I’m freezing! Do you think it’s going to rain?”

  “You’ve almost convinced me it’s going to snow. Good God, look over there!”

  She loo
ked away obediently. I had unhooked her bodice and pulled it away even before she had time to yell in protest, but her yell of protest never came and neither did my next gesture of affection.

  There was a long silence.

  I looked at her breasts, saw the small but unmistakable changes and knew that our personal relationship was finished. I said abruptly, “You’ve lied to me, haven’t you?” And as the tears streamed silently down her face, I felt myself slipping away from her down the treacherous slope into the past.

  Six

  I

  “PAPA!” CRIED VICKY. “I’M going to have a baby!”

  I was in New York, at the brownstone where she had lived after her marriage.

  “Well, Paul,” said Dolly as the decades slid backward before my eyes. “It looks like I’m going to have a baby.”

  I was in my chambers at Oxford, and Dolly wore her parlormaid’s uniform beneath her shabby coat. Dolly was blond and pert with an upturned nose which Vicky had not inherited and the violet eyes which Vicky had transformed with her vivacity.

  I wanted to stay with Dolly but I could not, for I was sliding backward in time again until my mother said to my father at the house on Nineteenth Street, “Charlotte’s having a baby. I suppose all we can do is pray it’s not afflicted.”

  “God damn it, Edith!” shouted my poor father, his guilt making him much too sensitive. “I refuse to tolerate any further snide references from you to the family weakness!”

  My father was a stupid man who possessed a certain basic measure of common sense. My mother was a clever woman who thought common sense was admirable but too often the hallmark of a pedestrian intellect. It was popularly supposed by everyone, themselves included, that they had a happy and successful marriage.

  “Marriage,” said my mother to me after my father’s death when we were obliged to sort out his debts and pay off his mistresses, “should not be a single railroad track but a line permitting travel in both directions. Of course your father married me for my fortune—and why not? He needed money and he was not the sort of man who could ever have earned his living in a manner acceptable to someone of his class. But I hardly came away empty-handed from the altar! I got a handsome, charming, well-bred husband, and that’s something every innocent girl longs for, especially a girl as plain as I was. Of course, I knew all about the other women, but what else could I have expected? Your father never opened a book and despised culture and he had to have some way of amusing himself in the evenings.”