Young Emmanuel (The Gollantz Family Saga Book 3) Read online

  Young Emmanuel

  The Gollantz Family Saga Book 3

  Naomi Jacob

  Copyright © The Estate of Naomi Jacob 2015

  This edition published 2018 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1932

  www.wyndhambooks.com/naomi-jacob

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for the enjoyment of the purchaser only. To share this ebook you must purchase an additional copy per recipient. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Image © Everett Collection (Shutterstock)

  The Gollantz Family Saga series

  by Naomi Jacob

  published by Wyndham Books

  The Founder of the House

  That Wild Lie …

  Young Emmanuel

  Four Generations

  Private Gollantz

  Gollantz: London, Paris, Milan

  Gollantz and Partners

  Wyndham Books: Timeless bestsellers for today’s readers

  Wyndham Books publishes the first ebook editions of bestselling works by some of the most popular authors of the twentieth century, including Lucilla Andrews, Ursula Bloom, Catherine Gaskin and Naomi Jacob. Enjoy our Historical, Family Saga, Regency, Romance and Medical fiction and non-fiction.

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  To

  ELLALINE TERRISS

  and

  SEYMOUR HICKS

  who have never learned to grow older

  but have only remembered to grow wiser

  and more understanding.

  With my love

  MICKIE

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Preview: Sara Dane by Catherine Gaskin

  Preview: Lily’s Daughter by Diana Raymond

  Preview: Hardacre by C. L. Skelton

  Chapter 1

  Angela gave a sigh of relief. As a sigh it was a trifle overdone, just a little theatrical, and it did not disturb Max in the least. He said nothing, smiled and waited.

  ‘Max dear,’ she said, ‘I like your friends, you know that. I like the Davises and the Bermans and the Salamans. I like all of them, but I do wish that they weren’t all so disgustingly rich.’

  ‘Why should it be disgusting to be rich?’ Max said.

  ‘I don’t suppose it is ‒ really. But the sight of six or seven Rolls standing at the door, in a long and expensive line, rouses some distant Communistic feeling in me. I wish some of them would arrive in battered Fords and Austins for a change.’

  Max Gollantz chuckled. ‘They may be rich, but none of them are rich enough to do that.’

  He came over to where she sat by the fire, with its high steel fender and furniture which gleamed like silver. Max looked down at her, as she lay back in the big chair, covered with wonderful old embroidery that he had found, he remembered, in a little village in Spain. As he watched her, his keen face softened, and he smiled. Max Gollantz had never been a handsome man, but when he smiled his face was very pleasant.

  ‘Talking of cars,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘Julian has smashed his again. Did he tell you?’

  Angela showed no sign of either surprise or anxiety. Julian was her second son, and she adored him. She prided herself upon being a woman of sound common sense, but she admitted to Max and to her father-in-law, old Emmanuel, that this admirable quality deserted her when she thought of Julian.

  ‘He’s not hurt,’ she said contentedly, ‘because he came in just now and was talking to Reuben Davis. Julian will break cars ‒ and probably other things ‒ all his life. We were too successful in Julian, Max. We managed to combine your charm and my looks, and then add something.’ She went on, speaking thoughtfully, ‘I sometimes wonder if Julian hasn’t got too much of everything ‒ looks, brain, personality. It’s not quite fair, is it?’

  ‘He’s a wonderful fellow,’ Max agreed, ‘but he’s damned expensive!’

  ‘You can afford it,’ she said easily. ‘We both have far too much money. Julian, of necessity, must be something of a luxury. Not,’ quickly, ‘that they are not all wonderful ‒ Emmanuel, the dearest thing in the world. How like our own Emmanuel he is, Max. It’s startling sometimes. And Bill ‒ Bill’s a dear. I love them all, but to each other we can admit that there is something additional in Julian. He’s rare ‒ that’s the word ‒ rare. I have met four perfectly charming and delightful men in my life, this is excluding the Founder of the House, they are my three sons and the man I had the good taste to choose as a husband.’

  Max said, ‘And after that I must pay up for Julian’s car and look pleasant, eh?’

  ‘You’d have done that without my paying you compliments.’ She stretched out her hands to the crackling wood fire, and smiled up over her shoulder at her husband. Max, looking down at her, thought, as he thought so often, that she was as charming as she had ever been. She remained the ideal woman. They had been married for twenty-five years, each year had seen them drawing closer together, seen them more and more content with each other, and had found their love and their friendship more securely cemented.

  Angela often said that if she had not married Max, she would have lost her best friend; and that if she had kept him in her life only as a friend she would have lost the ideal husband.

  He stood beside her now, in the great drawing-room at Ordingly, the house which his father had bought twenty-three years before. In those years the house had taken on something of the character of the man to whom it belonged. It was beautiful, dignified, and it had personality.

  Max had modelled himself on his father, and had succeeded in attaining the same position, the same respect and the same reputation for taste and integrity. He had never succeeded in being as spectacular as his father, but as Angela said, no family could have two Emmanuel Gollantzes in it and survive.

  He stood by his wife, very erect, his dark hair turning grey, his face well cut and his smile one of the pleasant things of the world. His smile radiated kindliness and sympathy. His whole nature was clean, and as kind and sympathetic as his smile. When his father had retired from the great business of Gollantz and Son, its reputation had been world wide; and Max had done nothing to diminish that reputation. He had added to the great premises and warehouses, without materially altering their structure. He had bought wisely and with courage, and he had always sold well with profits which were never small, but which had never permitted men to stigmatize him as a profi
teer.

  Max had not only a specialist’s knowledge of beautiful things, but he had a real love for them. Ugly things, which might happen to be in vogue for the moment, he bought under protest, but they remained in his showrooms and were never allowed to have a place in his own home. With all his knowledge, and all his experience, Max never hesitated to ask advice of his father; and when at the age of eighty-eight, old Emmanuel Gollantz had declared his intention of going to the great picture sale of the year, Max had hailed his decision with delight.

  It had filled him with pride that he was able to walk into the long room, filled with the best known connoisseurs of the world, accompanied by his father, the great Emmanuel Gollantz. Max never forgot the impression that his father’s entrance had made. Tall, and still erect, dressed in the style which he had adopted sixty years before and still retained. His long tight coat, with its collar of astrakhan, his high collar with its black satin stock and the famous ‘Anstruther’ black pearl, his top hat with its low crown and very curled brim, his ebony cane with its great ivory knob ‒ men turned their eyes and whispered as he passed.

  When the bidding had started, Emmanuel had taken out his gold pencil and made notes, as he had done years before. He made no bids, the pictures were not worthy of his consideration. Max bought, and his father was silent. But when the Gainsborough was brought out, and the precious thing was placed on the easel, Max felt his father catch his breath and knew that his muscles stiffened.

  He leant over to Max and whispered: ‘Please, Max ‒ this is vere I vill speak. You don’t mind?’

  ‘I’d rather you did, father. It’s going to be a tussle.’

  His father had laughed softly. ‘Vot is that vord ‒ tussle? There will be no tussling, if you please.’

  The room had waited ‒ they had listened to bids of a thousand guineas, two, three, four, five, and still Emmanuel Gollantz had not spoken, had not even stirred. The dealers whispered that old man Gollantz waited until it was worth his while to expend his energy. Someone else waited too, and when the bidding reached fifty thousand and the figure was called in a voice with a distinct nasal accent, Emmanuel moved.

  ‘Fifty-fife,’ he said.

  The nasal voice returned, ‘Fifty-six.’

  Emmanuel said, ‘Fifty-seffen.’

  ‘Fifty-eight.’

  There was a pause, the silence was terrible. Max took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Was his father going to let it go, was he going to allow this lovely thing to cross the Atlantic, was his nerve going to fail him? Max felt that he must make the next bid for the honour of the House of Gollantz.

  ‘Fifty-nine.’ Emmanuel had spoken.

  Again a silence. Emmanuel turned, lifted his single eyeglass and stared round the room; finding the eyes that he sought, he gave a very small, almost imperceptible bow. The silence continued, it seemed to Max to have lasted for years, in reality it was perhaps six or seven seconds. The hammer fell, and a voice said: ‘Mr. Emmanuel Gollantz.’

  Emmanuel rose, made his little inclination of the head to the auctioneer, turned and walked out followed by his son.

  ‘I was obliged to hev it,’ he said to Max as they drove home. ‘It was unthinkable that she ‒’ he often spoke of pictures as ‘he’ and ‘she’ according to the subject ‒ ‘should have gone to America. It was my duty as well as my very great pleasure.’

  Max had the same pride in their business; like his father he looked upon it as a kind of trust, that England’s beautiful things should be kept for England and the enjoyment of the English people.

  If his pride in his business was great, his pride in his family was even greater. His wife, to Max Gollantz, was the most delightful woman in the world. No other woman had ever demanded his love, and he argued that this fact alone proved that Angela was unique. His three sons, Emmanuel John, Julian Edward, and William Hermann, were second only to their mother in his affections. Emmanuel at twenty was in business with Max, Julian had chosen politics as his destiny. William was still at school.

  Emmanuel, who might have been a reproduction of his grandfather at the same age, was clever. He had his grandfather’s taste, and in addition to his father’s knowledge had the same flair for beautiful things that had been of such assistance to old Emmanuel when he first came to England. He was the only one of the younger generation who retained the spectacular methods of his grandfather. Emmanuel, while being a perfectly normal young man, had learnt what suited him, and wore his clothes with an air which took his mother and father back to the time when old Emmanuel Gollantz was the best-dressed man in London.

  Young Emmanuel worked hard, and played hard. He kept fit because he disliked men who were flabby, and he wanted to keep his figure. He loved beauty, he adored music, and he rarely missed a first night. Women affected him very little. He liked them, but when their liking began to be tinged with sentiment, Emmanuel fled. His great passion was for his mother. To him, she stood for all that a woman could and should be. All his life he had regarded her as someone removed from ordinary mortals. She was, quite literally, the centre of his world, and all his actions were determined by the thought of what she would feel about this or that. She was his final court of appeal, his authority for everything.

  Once, when he was seven, she had been very ill, so ill that Max and his father went about with white strained faces and lived only to hear the latest reports of the doctors. Max remembered how Julian had cried and refused to be comforted, how little Bill, frightened by the strange new atmosphere, had whimpered and asked for his mother perpetually. Emmanuel had said nothing, done nothing but sit silent with a drawn face, and dark eyes which held nothing but misery. His father had found him, sitting on the stairs, listening for the doctor’s footsteps. He had lifted the boy in his arms and looked into his face, appalled at its wretchedness. Finally, in despair he had carried him down to old Emmanuel hoping that he might find some way to distract him.

  ‘Why this vite face, if you please?’ Emmanuel had said.

  The boy caught a sob and strangled it before it left his lips.

  ‘I’m frightened.’

  ‘But vhy frightened? Presently ve shall hev goot news of your mudder.’

  The little boy shook his head. ‘She might die,’ he said, ‘that’s what frightens me, because I should die too, and I might never find her. The place she went to might be too big.’

  He had sat there, on his grandfather’s knee, white and rigid. Emmanuel had found nothing to say, and they had sat there like two carved figures. Then the door had opened and Sir Nathan Bernstein had come in. He had looked at them, and smiled. Rather a pale smile for he had not slept for two nights.

  ‘Ith’s all right,’ he lisped. ‘The crithis is over. We have only von battle left to fight ‒ veakness.’

  Emmanuel had said: ‘Dayenu!’

  Bernstein had nodded. ‘Indeed, yes! Give me the little boy ‒ he has fainted.’

  And with the years this love had grown, until his mother was everything to her eldest son, and he wanted no companion if she could give him her company. Not that he was a sentimental young man, for Emmanuel could drive a bargain, rule his workpeople, get the better of most men in a deal, play a hard game of tennis, ride hard, and swim like a fish.

  Emmanuel knew, though he never allowed himself to dwell upon the fact, that his mother gave the greatest share of her love to his brother Julian. It did not distress him in the least ‒ his mother had a right to give her love where she wished, and Emmanuel would have been the first person to admit his brother’s fascination. He loved Julian dearly, though young William mattered perhaps more to him. The fact that he realized that his mother was happiest when Julian was at home, when she was going off to some theatre with Julian or talking to him in the garden under one of the huge trees, did not hurt him. Angela gave him a great deal, and whatever Angela did was automatically right.

  Julian was, as Angela Gollantz had said to Max, rare. He had too many fairies at his christening. At school, he had c
arried off prizes and rewards in an endless procession. Now he was secretary to his mother’s second cousin, Sir Gilbert Drew, a cabinet minister at forty and noted for his brilliance as well as his caution. Drew stated openly that Julian had a great career before him.

  ‘He mops up facts and figures as a sponge mops up water. He makes deductions which are not only rapid but invariably correct. He holds his audience, and makes dry bones live for them. He can do more work in four hours than the average young man can do in ten.’

  Like his brother, Julian played hard as well as worked hard. He refused to believe that success was found by keeping one’s nose perpetually to the grindstone. He put his theory into practice. He worked from ten to five, he took an hour for lunch and half an hour for tea. No one had ever known Julian to work over hours, and yet no one had ever been able to reproach him with leaving work undone. After dancing hard until the small hours of the morning, Julian arrived at the office clear-eyed and clear-headed and fell upon his work with undiminished energy.

  A woman had once said of the two brothers, that you believed Emmanuel to be the handsomest youngster you had ever met until you saw Julian; that you believed Emmanuel to be the most delightful companion in the world, until Julian came and talked to you.

  As a little boy he had been delicate, and when he first went to school, Angela had suffered tortures for fear he might be taken ill, or might be miserable in his new surroundings. He had come home for the holidays, and stated that he adored school, that he had made heaps of friends, and that he looked forward to the next term with delightful anticipation. His mother had been vaguely disappointed. She remembered that Emmanuel, though he had done well at school, had never hesitated to say that he loathed it and only lived for the holidays. Later he had decided that school was ‘Not so bad’, but had never concealed the fact that nothing could ever be as perfect as Ordingly.

  Julian spent a great deal of money. Old Emmanuel said: ‘Not spent, if you please ‒ vastet!’

  Angela remembered the first night Julian had come home for good. How she had come down early and found him standing in the big drawing-room. He had looked so slim, and tall, so really beautiful with the light catching his fair hair. He had stood near her and looked down at her, with a little smile on his lips.