The Rich Are Different

by Susan Howatch

  Unfortunately anyone less calm, detached and sensible than I, as I prepared for my first night with Paul in three and a half years, would have been impossible to imagine. I was trembling with anticipation yet quivering with dread, one moment dreaming of moonlight, roses and whispered “I love you’s” and the next sweating in horror at the thought of stifled yawns, awkward platitudes and the hideous epilogue “I’ll telephone you sometime.” Filing my nails in a frenzy, I told myself that both the romantic dream and the nauseous nightmare were equally unrealistic. He had never once stifled a yawn when making love to me—and he had never once said “I love you” either—so it was most unlikely he would start now. Probably we would make each other laugh and rip a sheet or two and afterwards say how much we had missed each other.

  Yet I could not help wondering if he had missed me at all. I realized that after he had returned from England he had at once found someone else; it was the only plausible explanation for his long silence and his attempt to end our personal relationship, but although the thought of that was distasteful I no longer minded it. Obviously there could be no other woman in his life at present or he would never have sent for me. For the hundredth time I speculated fruitlessly about his true feelings. If Paul had actually said to me, “I love you,” I would probably have disbelieved him, yet I knew he had loved me at Mallingham and although I could admit that the love had faded I preferred to think it was dormant rather than dead.

  I hoped I was avoiding the sin of wishful thinking.

  The thought of sin cheered me up and the next moment I was quivering again, not with fright but with lust. It was odd to think that in Victorian days lust had been considered an exclusively male vice. I reflected on the ghastly heroines of Tennyson with their pure alabaster brows, and wondered what they would have thought of a nude male. After thanking God I hadn’t lived seventy years ago I spent some time daydreaming of myself with a pure alabaster brow and some disembodied male organ, and then with reluctance I tore myself away from my stimulating thoughts to choose a dress for the evening.

  Thanks to the gourmet cuisine of the Berengaria I could hardly squeeze myself into an evening dress which would match my earrings, but where there’s a will there’s a way. The dress had narrow shoulder straps and dropped straight from the bust to the hips in a bead-encrusted green tube, while at the hips the satin hung in draped folds to form a dipped hemline somewhere around the knees. Unfortunately my hips destroyed the elegant tubelike effect by bulging at the exact point at which the beads ended, but I told myself that since Paul had never cared for the masculinity of postwar women’s fashions he would be glad to see that my hips were still much in evidence. Wriggling into my slave bangle, I grabbed my ostrich-feather fan, pursed my lips into a Clara Bow bee-sting and did a little Charleston in front of the looking glass.

  By the time Paul arrived I was again standing before the glass as I admired my brand-new flesh-colored rayon stockings.

  “My God,” said Paul, “what’s that peculiar stuff on your legs? And why are you wearing a bracelet above the elbow?”

  “Oh, I’ll take everything off—”

  “So soon? Even the Romans waited till after the stuffed dormice!”

  “But if you think I look awful—”

  “My dear, you look riveting! I hope I’m not so old that I can’t resign myself to modern feminine fashions. Peterson, you’re the expert on repulsive American slang—could Miss Slade be described as a jazz-baby?”

  Peterson laughed. He was not in the least dour, as bodyguards are popularly supposed to be, and I had never once felt embarrassed by his presence when Paul and I spent our long summer together in 1922.

  “What happened to O’Reilly?” I asked idly, remembering Paul’s other employee who had accompanied him on all his visits to Mallingham. We had said good night to Alan and were walking outside to the Rolls-Royce.

  “He was promoted,” said Paul in exactly the same tone of voice as if he had said, “He died,” and began to talk about the restaurant where we were to have dinner.

  “It’s across town on Park Avenue,” he was saying, “and it’s called the Restaurant Marguery. In my opinion it’s even better than its namesake in Paris, but we’ll see what you think of it.”

  By that time I would have been enthralled by a workers’ café, but the Marguery would no doubt have satisfied the most discriminating of epicures. The decoration was formal, with gray paneled walls in the style of Louis Seize; evidently the French kings were popular among the interior decorators of New York. The pale-green furniture was decked with rose-and-ivory brocade, and the lighting came from sparkling chains and pendants of crystal reminding me of a series of elaborate fountains. There were secluded nooks for dinners à deux. Ours was decorated with pink and white carnations, and beneath a napkin another illegal bottle of the best French champagne reclined in a silver bucket.

  “Whatever happened to Prohibition?” I could not resist asking as the champagne was uncorked. “Isn’t it against the law to drink like this?”

  “Welcome to Mayor Jimmy Walker’s New York, Dinah, where even the law is for sale to anyone who can afford it! Now what would you like to eat? The filet de sole Marguery is the speciality of the house. …”

  I decided that ancient Rome was not dead after all but reincarnated in the Western Hemisphere.

  “No, I think eighteenth-century England would be a closer parallel,” said Paul, and as he talked, littering his explanation with philosophical, historical and literary references, I felt my mind sharpening against his until it seemed to expand with exhilaration.

  Some time later we were deep in a discussion about obscenity in literature, but it was only after I had lost the thread of my masterly argument three times that I suddenly realized he had been drinking water while I had consumed almost the entire bottle of champagne.

  “Paul, you villain, you’ve got me drunk!”

  “That’s so that I can now ruthlessly cross-examine you on how you’ve spent the last three years!”

  “You know exactly how I’ve spent the last three years! I was the one who always wrote. Remember? I never indulged in long rude baffling silences!”

  “My dear, Americans forgot the art of letter-writing as soon as the telephone became popular, but when it becomes possible to phone London from New York I promise I’ll make amends to you.” He finished his coffee, and when he replaced his cup I saw to my astonishment that his hand was shaking. “Shall we go?”

  “Back to the hotel?” I said confused as he thrust his hands out of sight beneath the table.

  “No, I have a pied-à-terre near here by the river. I thought we could drink some brandy while I point out the famous landmarks to you.”

  “How divine! I’d love that,” I said, baffled by the discrepancy between his casual invitation and his unmistakable signs of tension.

  “Dinah,” he said as soon as we were in the car, “I’m really sorry about those letters.”

  “Which letters?”

  “The ones I didn’t write. Are you angry?”

  With astonishment I realized he was beside himself with nervousness because he thought I was nursing some dark satanic grudge. It seemed so funny to think of Paul—of all people—being even remotely ill-at-ease in a woman’s presence that I laughed out loud. It’s remarkable how the least humorous facts can seem amusing after one has consumed nearly a full bottle of champagne.

  “Well, Paul,” I said frankly, “I was absolutely livid with you, but after I decided to accept your invitation to New York I also decided to let bygones be bygones. And of course as soon as I saw you again I immediately forgot there had been any bygones at all.”

  He gave me a worried little smile. “So everything’s forgiven?”

  “For God’s sake, Paul, what’s the matter with you? Don’t pretend you don’t know how beastly attractive you are, because I loathe false modesty.”

  “You didn’t think I’d changed?”

  “Well, when I first saw you I
did think you looked as though you needed a holiday. Have you been working too hard?”

  “I regret to say I have. It was foolish of me. You got O’Reilly’s letter last summer telling you that I was ill?”

  “Paul, I wrote three times to ask if you were better!”

  He looked confused. “I’m sorry. Mayers was dealing with my personal correspondence by that time and O’Reilly must have forgotten to tell him your letters had to be acknowledged.”

  “But were you very ill? What was the matter?”

  “It was nothing, just exhaustion forcing me to rest for a couple of months, but I’m better now.” He smiled and gave me a kiss. “As soon as I saw you,” he teased, “I sloughed off my nineteenth-century chains and felt twenty years younger!”

  I kissed him back.

  “Sutton Place, sir,” said the chauffeur after the car had been stationary for over a minute.

  “Thank you, Wilson,” said Paul, springing out of the car with all his old alacrity. “Peterson, you’d better come up with us. It’s probably quite unnecessary, but I’d hate to be assassinated by some Bolshevik at this particular moment, because it would be so very tiresome for Miss Slade.”

  We entered the gleaming foyer of a tall block of flats and I was led reluctantly into a lift with an amazing array of numbers on the panel.

  “I have the penthouse here,” explained Paul as the lift attendant closed the doors. “It’s on the twenty-eighth floor and the views are really very fine.”

  “Oh yes?” I said, trying not to think of twenty-eight floors receding beneath me. As soon as the lift stopped I rushed out before it could plummet to the ground.

  Peterson stepped past me to unlock the door, and when he moved inside, switching on the lights, I followed him across the threshold.

  “Paul!” I had seen the view. “My God, what a sight!” I exclaimed as Peterson finished his inspection and left us alone in the flat.

  Later I discovered that the building stood on the extreme east side of the city and that the windows of the living room faced both south down the East River and west into midtown Manhattan. The skyscrapers stood facing one another like an army of monsters poised for conflict, and their glowing windows and floodlit spires gave the sky an unearthly glow. Despite the darkness I felt I could still clearly see the radiant steel and shining glass of those miracles of construction, and as I stood by the window it seemed to me that I saw a country barely touched by the disillusionment which the War had brought to Europe, a world still gripped by the nineteenth-century delusion that all scientific achievement led to progress while all progress led to the improvement of mankind. For the first time I understood why America had entered the War so reluctantly and retreated afterwards into isolation. America lived in a different world, a world of shining optimism, boundless achievement and unblemished hopes. The tortured failures and writhings of Europe would have seemed not only boring but irrelevant; I was reminded of a rich man who will not leave his castle because he is both embarrassed and annoyed by the crude spectacle of the poor man suffering at his gate.

  “I suppose America will never be invaded or occupied,” I said slowly. “It’ll never suffer as the European countries have suffered.”

  “No country is impregnable from disaster,” said Paul, “and not all disasters come complete with bombs and bayonets. Think of Roman Britain. The trouble didn’t begin when the Saxons decided it was an amusing place to visit. The trouble began when something went wrong with the economy and the cities became unmanageable.”

  “But what could possibly go wrong with the American economy?” I said astonished.

  “There’s a lot wrong with it already.”

  “But the stock market! I thought—”

  “That’s our rich golden façade,” he interrupted, making a gesture which included the brilliant city lights with the market, “and at present few people care to look beyond it. But the boom only applies to certain sections of the market. Agriculture’s depressed. The government is essentially impotent and growth is unstable. Do you remember Tennyson’s Kraken?”

  “The monster that no one knew about? The one who awoke and rose out of the depths?”

  “How gratifying that your knowledge of Tennyson has improved!” He paused to take some glasses out of a cabinet. “Tennyson’s Kraken’s sleeping peacefully on Wall Street,” he said presently. “He’s an economic version of Frankenstein’s monster, designed by the investment bankers for a public in love with a roulette wheel, and someday he’s going to wake up and breathe fire in all directions. … Why, how like Cassandra I sound! I must stop at once. Do you want to take a look around? The bedroom has a fine view to the north and east.”

  The bedroom looked as if it had been designed by Casanova with help from an Arabian sheik. Hidden lighting illuminated the most, incongruous feature of the room, an eighteenth-century ceiling inset with exquisite miniatures of cherubs.

  “My God, Paul!” I called amazed. “This looks just like an Angelica Kauffmann ceiling!”

  “It is,” he said, appearing in the doorway with the brandy glasses. “There was a house called Cullom Park for sale in 1919, just before I left Europe, and when no one bought it I arranged for this particular ceiling to be shipped over here before the house could be demolished. Why are you laughing?”

  “Because it was such a typically American thing to do and I never think of you as being typically American!”

  “I fail to see your point. The ceiling was very fine. I saved it. I see nothing humorous in the situation,” he said shortly, and walked out.

  My heart thudded with fright. “Paul …”

  “If you don’t like it we’ll go somewhere else,” he said, drinking his brandy rapidly.

  “I do like it! I was laughing in admiration—admiration for your American resourcefulness!”

  “No, it would be better if we went somewhere else. This is the wrong atmosphere. I should never have brought you here.”

  I protested further, but when he insisted on going I followed him in silence to the lift.

  We waited in the hall by the shaft, but I could think of nothing to say. I was too conscious of his tension, and in terror I saw the evening turned sour, our reunion ruined, our affair cut off before it could be renewed. I made frantic efforts to guess what was going on in Paul’s mind but soon decided I would have had a better chance of understanding a series of Etruscan hieroglyphics.

  The lift came. I had to think of a solution before we reached the ground floor and he made some excuse to abandon the evening. The doors of the lift closed. I looked wildly around for inspiration, and when my glance came to rest on Paul I saw the deep lines about his mouth and remembered that he had been ill.

  Memory returned with the force of a punch between the eyes. I saw my father hobbling back into my stepmother’s room too soon after a debilitating attack of gout and growling in frustration the next morning, “Damn it, it’s no fun being fifty-five!” For at least half an hour I had been obliged to listen to a boring dissertation on the recurring problems of middle-aged men, and I was still trying to remember how my father had cured himself (his cures had become increasingly bizarre) when the lift reached the ground floor.

  “Well,” said Paul stiffly, “we may as well return to the Plaza.”

  I saw the memory floating past and pounced on it. My father had locked himself up with his current mistress in the belfry of Mallingham Church and had made love among the bells. Obviously the remedy was to be thoroughly original with a touch of the spiritual.

  “Oh, Paul!” I said, trying to sound disappointed yet soothing. “The night’s so—so—” Could I really say “so young”? I could and did. Desperation will occasionally drive me to excessive lengths. “Don’t let’s go to the Plaza just yet!” I said winningly. “After all, there’s plenty of time later for all that sort of thing, and just now there’s only one place in all New York that I really want to see. I know it sounds absurd but could we motor down to Wall Street to see the
bank? I’ve been looking forward for years to seeing where you make your millions and dictate the economy, and I don’t think I can control my curiosity a single hour longer. Oh Paul, do let’s go! It’s not impossible, is it? Surely nothing’s impossible in New York!”

  He swung to face me. I saw the stillness in his eyes before he gave me his special smile.

  “I’d be the last person ever to tell you,” he said laughing, “that something’s impossible!” And walking over to the car where the chauffeur was dozing and Peterson was smoking a cigarette, he told both men they were dismissed for the evening.

  They stared at him openmouthed.

  “But sir,” stammered Peterson, “if you’re going for a walk—”

  “I’m not going to walk. I’m going to drive.”

  The chauffeur’s head jerked up. Peterson blanched. “But sir! Sir, I’ll drive you if you want Wilson to go home—”

  “Do you want me to fire you, Peterson?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Then do as I say and go home.”

  The two men backed away in silence as we scrambled into the car.

  “The hell with them!” said Paul as he pushed the starter on the floor with his foot and the engine roared exuberantly into life. “The hell with everyone! All right, Dinah, close your eyes and say your prayers—we’re off to Willow and Wall!”

  I clutched my seat as the car shot forward. “Paul, have you ever driven a car before?”

  “I drove all the time before the War—when motoring was a true adventure! I lost interest later when automobiles became so predictable.”