“The very mention of her name makes me feel hopelessly inferior,” I said depressed.
“Let’s go home and get stewed.”
We did our best to laugh off our gloom, but it was a dismal evening, and the next morning we both turned to our work with relief.
In Milk Street the resident partner greeted Steve with the news that he was moving to another house, so although Steve had not intended to assume sole control of the London office he still found he had the familiar reins thrust back into his hands. Privately I hoped he would fall in love again with his earlier dream of a European empire, but I had reconciled myself to his inevitable return to New York. I liked the idea of opening an American salon. I felt it was exactly the challenge I needed now that my business was ten years old, but I did not want to emigrate permanently to America, and I suspected that dividing our time between two continents might prove difficult in practice. However, I was determined to give the scheme a try. I liked New York, and perhaps if I returned I might succeed in laying Paul’s ghost to rest.
I wondered what I would think of Cornelius when we met.
Cornelius never wrote to Steve. I found this total silence unnerving, but Steve was unperturbed. “What’s the little bastard going to say?” he said with a shrug. “With his past marital history he can hardly start preaching to me!” And when he laughed at the memory I saw he no longer took Cornelius seriously. Cornelius was almost ousted from the Willow Street nest. Cornelius was past history.
I often thought of Cornelius. Once upon a time everyone but Paul had regarded him as an effeminate nonentity, but that opinion had long since fallen by the wayside. The newspapers and magazines now watched him with bated breath, and I watched, too; I had followed him every step of the way through his ruthless divorce and his cold-blooded seduction of another man’s pregnant wife, which had been so luridly chronicled in the international gossip columns. Cornelius was twenty-five years old, rich, handsome and notorious, and from a distance of over three thousand miles I could feel the mysterious force of his brutal sinister faceless personality. I thought of him as faceless because in all the photographs I had seen of him his face had been devoid of expression. I did realize that this was probably a device he used to shield himself from the intrusions of the press, but nonetheless it made his personality the more repugnant to me and I knew, whenever I saw his picture, that I was afraid of him.
The thought that he was the legal owner of Mallingham still gave me the most appalling nightmares, and I would often dream that I returned to Mallingham to find him lying in wait for me in the empty house. Usually I would wake up as he walked towards me, but once I stayed asleep long enough to see the knife in his hand.
The second time I awoke screaming Steve demanded an explanation, but when I confided in him he roared with laughter.
“Honey, this kid doesn’t run around waving stilettos!”
“The knife,” I said coldly, “is, of course, symbolic.”
He tried to take me seriously. “Dinah, you’ll take Mallingham’s secret to your grave. We’ve been through all that.”
“Yes. Yes, I know I’m being silly.”
He tried again. “Hell, Dinah, this is just a little guy who orders hamburgers in high-class restaurants and spends a wild party holding hands with his wife on the nearest love seat!”
“Yes. Not Jack the Ripper. Yes, I do understand. I just wish we didn’t always end up on opposite sides, that’s all. Steve, what do you think Cornelius felt when he heard you’d left Emily for that recurring menace Dinah Slade?”
“Well, I’ll bet he was livid. Sure he was. But what can he do about it except help Emily with the divorce?”
“I think he’ll want revenge.”
He sighed patiently. “Honey, you’ve just had a nightmare and you’re in a melodramatic frame of mind. This isn’t grand opera, this isn’t Chicago, and New York is Fiorello La Guardia’s town now, not Jimmy Walker’s. Cornelius isn’t going to go running around with a hatchet, symbolic or otherwise. For the good of his career he’s got to stay on good terms with me. Even if he does want revenge he’s going to have to forgo it, and anyway Emily won’t want any bitterness which will upset the children. She’ll calm Cornelius down, just you wait and see.”
I waited. Emily arrived back in New York and sensibly, with the minimum of fuss, instituted divorce proceedings. When she wrote to Steve to give him news of the children Cornelius’ unbroken silence seemed louder than ever, but I said nothing and began instead to organize a spring wedding. I decided it would be foolish for me to become neurotic over Cornelius and besides, I had too many other matters to attend to.
Nanny loomed large on the horizon. She had threatened to give notice when Steve had reentered my life and had been appeased only when I told her of the wedding plans.
“It won’t be in church, I suppose?” was her gloomy reaction when I mentioned we were waiting for Steve’s divorce.
Nanny was a religious fanatic who radiated gloom in the presence of every person over twelve. After Mary Oakes had retired to get married I had had great difficulty replacing her, first because of my notoriety and second because the twins had always been “a handful.” I could never keep a nursemaid longer than six months, and I had employed two nannies in rapid succession before I found the nanny who had enough fortitude to endure the scandal, the hard work and the chaos of disappearing nursemaids. I kept her because she somehow managed to retain the twins’ respect as well as their affection, but I found her very tiring.
“When are you going to tell the children, madam?” she inquired, looking at me as if I were preparing for a clandestine marriage.
I had been so afraid that some disaster might prevent the marriage that I had wanted to keep our engagement a secret until the divorce was granted, but when Nanny said sternly, “I think Alan should be told,” I promised to break the news to him. Alan had never asked either Steve or me if we intended to marry, and we were so conscious of our broken promise of four years ago that we now had a superstitious reluctance to raise the subject with him.
However, Nanny had laid down the law, so that evening I summoned all my courage, followed Alan into the dining room when he retired to do his homework, and once more began to talk of wedding plans.
“A real wedding?” said Alan suspiciously. “With photographs?”
“Yes, darling. Absolutely real with photographs galore.”
“I won’t have to be there, will I?”
“Oh, but—” I checked myself, clamped down on an emotional response and tried to be reasonable. “Why don’t you want to come?”
Alan started taking books out of his satchel. “It would be embarrassing. I don’t want to go to a wedding where everyone will stare at me and tell each other I never had a father.”
“But you did have a father!”
“Not a proper one who married you in church.”
“But he wanted to marry me just before he died!”
“Why didn’t he marry you before I was born?”
“Well, he was married to someone else, and—”
“Why didn’t he divorce her?”
“Well, I … Well, you see …”
“Why did he leave us alone all those years?”
“He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to marry me.”
“Why not? Why did he make you have a baby if he wasn’t sure? Why did he go away? And why didn’t he leave me anything in his will? Why did he leave everything to that Cornelius person as if I didn’t exist?”
“But Alan, I’ve told you before—he was going to make a special provision for you!”
“Well, he didn’t, did he?” said Alan. “And I know why. He was embarrassed about me. Cornelius is embarrassed, too— that’s why he’s never written to me even though I’m his cousin. Tony told me Emily said she’d like to meet me, but of course she won’t want to now that you’ve taken Steve away from her. I’m cut off from my relations,” said Alan, working himself up to an enraged peroration, “an
d it’s all your fault and I don’t care whether you and Steve get married and why don’t you just leave me alone?”
I slunk away. “What am I to do?” I said in tears to Steve.
“Talk back to him! Stand up for yourself! Don’t let him get away with that kind of nonsense—can’t you see he doesn’t want to get away with it? For God’s sake!” exclaimed Steve, exasperated. “Here, let me talk to him.”
An hour later Alan marched into the drawing room where I was pretending to read a newspaper. “I’m sorry, Mummy,” he said in a small high voice, and burrowed his way into my arms.
Steve, who had been watching from the doorway, disappeared noiselessly towards the stairs.
“It’s all right, Alan,” I said. “I do understand if you don’t want to come to the wedding.”
“Steve said I might like to come to the wedding because the registry office will be small and the only people there will be people I know. But he said I needn’t come to the reception afterwards.”
“That’s sensible of him. Wedding receptions are usually very boring.”
Alan sat up, pushed back his pale hair and examined a bruise on his knee, “Mummy, afterwards I want to go to a new school and be called Alan Sullivan. I want Steve to be my father. I’m going to call him Daddy. He said I could if you didn’t mind.”
I thought of Paul playing with Alan on that Long Island beach.
“Please, Mummy!”
“All right, darling. Yes. If that’s what you really want.”
He smiled. His dark eyes shone. He was happy.
After Alan had skipped back to his homework Steve entered the drawing room and sat down beside me.
“You did the right thing, Dinah.”
“Yes.” I made a great effort. “Thank you, Steve—for being so kind to him and so generous.” There was a pause while I tried to say something else but could not.
His hand slid over mine. “Dinah, Alan will come back to Paul. It’s just that right now Paul’s no use to him, but be patient. It’ll be different later.”
“Do you really think so? Then I feel better,” I said, and tried to close my mind against the past.
I failed. We went to the suite he still retained at the Ritz, and in the humiliation of my failure I started acting again, putting the clock back to 1929. At first I thought he had been deceived, but when he said casually afterwards, “I thought we were going to have an honest relationship, Dinah?” I started to cry.
He immediately held me so close I thought my ribs would crack. “I could strangle him!” he growled.
I had to laugh, but my tears refused to stop. “No, I won’t talk of him, Steve, I refuse to, talking keeps him alive and he’s been dead more than seven years.”
“Trust Paul to achieve true immortality!” He sighed, released me and lit us both cigarettes. “It’s the only kind of immortality that exists—I don’t believe all that nonsense about life after death. Who the hell wants to go wandering through eternity with no booze, no sex and no entertainment of any kind? Real immortality isn’t up there in the heavens—it’s right here on earth. It’s living on in people’s memories and influencing their lives. But God damn it, I’m going to have the last laugh on Paul Van Zale! He may have struck every note on your whole damned keyboard, but he never managed to marry you!”
I laughed again and suddenly loved him so much that I slipped beyond Paul’s reach. Extinguishing our cigarettes, I switched off the light and pulled him back impulsively into my arms.
His divorce was granted in March. We promptly set our wedding date, and on the twenty-fifth of April, 1934, eight years after our first meeting in front of a Greenwich Village nightclub, we were married at Caxton Hall.
III
I wore a bright-green silk dress designed by Schiaparelli. Since I could not by the remotest stretch of the imagination be described as a virgin bride, I saw no point in decking myself out in pastels or even in a discreet navy blue. Fashion suited me at that time. The squared shoulders and leg-o’-mutton sleeves had the magical effect of making my hips look slim, and since skirts were once more flapping within inches of the ankles this long look gave me a sleek streamlined appearance. I spent two hours over my makeup and used at least fifteen of my own products, from the Orange-Blossom-of-Rhodes body lotion to the brand-new Circe-the-Seductress perfume, a cunning blend of scents which included jasmine, tuberose, oil of geranium and ionone. When I finally emerged from the salon my employees gave me a royal farewell and Steve reeled so far with admiration that his top hat fell off.
I was so nervous I could hardly crawl into our new Rolls-Royce.
“I’m terrified,” I said to Steve.
“Honey, I haven’t been so scared since England went off the gold standard.”
Only the children and our closest friends were at the civil ceremony, which took place in a sunny room dominated by an elaborate flower arrangement. Mrs. Oakes assumed the role of mother of the bride and wept happily into her best lace handkerchief as she played her role to the hilt. Harriet was there, but although I had invited Geoffrey he had made an excuse not to be present. I was sorry for Geoffrey was one of my closest friends, but since I had made a similar excuse to avoid his wedding three years before I felt I could hardly be angry with him. I was very fond of Geoffrey and might well have married him in the dark months after Steve’s departure, but when he took me out to dinner it was not to propose to me but to declare his intention of marrying someone else. That served me right. I had rejected him too often before, and one cannot expect a healthy good-looking man to remain in love indefinitely with a woman who keeps getting pregnant by other men. Facing the facts stoically, I had made a special effort to be nice to his wife, who was shy, pretty and the exact opposite of me in every way, but I minded Geoffrey being married and I minded it particularly when my fortunes were at their lowest ebb and I needed a sympathetic friend to convince me life would improve.
His wife was just as nice to me as I was to her, and knitted little jackets for the twins. When she was killed in the car accident I was able to commiserate with Geoffrey without insincerity, and after he had told me every gory detail of the accident I told him every gory detail of Paul’s assassination. This exchange of tragedies brought us closer together again, and we remained close even after Steve had blazed back into my life.
“Curious how you’re so partial to Americans,” commented Geoffrey, facing my fate with the same stoicism I had summoned to help me accept his marriage, but he was friendly to Steve and even went so far as to tell me he preferred Steve to Paul. Considering he had loathed Paul, I hardly found this a compliment, but at least it encouraged me to send him a wedding invitation.
I was sorry not to see him at Caxton Hall.
Alan wore his best gray flannel suit with his new school tie, Edred wore a sailor suit and Elfrida wore her favorite blue party dress with the pink smocking and sash. Nanny was dressed in black and carried a prayer book. Amidst a hushed dignified atmosphere which reduced even the round-eyed twins to silence, I ceased to be Miss Dinah Slade and became the fourth Mrs. Steven Sullivan.
“I did it!” I said dazed to Steve afterwards as he kissed me. “I actually did it!” The gold ring on my wedding finger was almost hidden by the enormous diamond he had given me to celebrate our engagement. “I’m really married … with a husband …” I looked up at him to make sure he was there.
“You see how easy it was?” he said, laughing.
Speechless with happiness, I clutched his arm and smiled foolishly at the photographers who were waiting for us outside. The story of a notorious romance which had blossomed into respectability was obviously destined for attention in the popular dailies, and I looked forward to rising from the pages of the News of the World to a paragraph in the Daily Mail. Perhaps by the time I died I might even qualify for an obituary in the Times.
The next hurdle was our reception for three hundred at Claridge’s. Originally we had planned a small party, but once we started inviting our clien
ts the list had burgeoned with great speed. I worried about whether such a celebration of our quiet wedding was in the best of taste, but Steve swept my doubts aside by insisting that we’d earned the right to throw a party. I supposed we had, but when we entered Claridge’s I quailed at the ordeal awaiting me and wished we had retreated immediately for the honeymoon.
Two glasses of champagne later I was enjoying myself so much that I even forgot to worry about the children. Alan had departed with his governess for the British Museum, and since Nanny had had one of her “turns” after the ceremony, the nursemaid Clara was left to struggle ineffectually with the twins. They had a wonderful time stuffing themselves with sausage rolls, shoving caviar down each other’s necks and shamelessly preening themselves in front of anyone who made the mistake of saying how adorable they were, but after my third glass of champagne I could regard even the twins with tranquillity.
The party roared on, but eventually a small sticky hand clutched my sleeve. “Mummy,” said Elfrida, “Edred’s been sick behind a curtain.”
We rescued Edred and mopped him up.
“Mummy, I want to go home now.”
“Yes, I do too, Mummy.”
“All right, darlings. Let’s find Clara and put you all in a taxi.”
We dispatched the twins and looked at each other.
“Time to go!” said Steve, and I nodded thankfully.
For our wedding night we withdrew no further than the most luxurious suite of the Savoy, but at eleven o’clock the next morning we were boarding the Golden Arrow en route to the French Riviera.
IV
“So I finally succeeded in kicking Paul out of bed!”
“All the way across the Mediterranean to North Africa!”
We laughed. I was stupefied by my happiness. The sun shone brilliantly on the splendors of Monte Carlo, and the world floated past me in a sensuous haze.
“Time to extend the dynasty?”
But I had lost my desire to emulate Queen Victoria. I was no longer obsessed with the idea that numerous children would guarantee me affection, and all that concerned me was that I should have enough affection for however many children I chose to have. “Maybe I should be content with what I’ve got,” I said to Steve. “I seem to have made such a mess of bringing up Alan, and the twins never listen to anyone except Nanny. But I would like another little girl,” I added impulsively, unable to resist the prospect of married motherhood.
The Rich Are Different Page 77