Four Generations (The Gollantz Family Saga Book 4) Page 3

  England and Ordingly. Angela being wonderful, trying to heal all the scars; Max very kind, begging his pardon: Bill ‒ who had never known the full facts of the letters, and who never should, please God ‒ glad to have him home, inclined to make a hero of him. And Viva very clear-cut, just a little hard, but oh, so good to talk to again. Viva with her funny modern trick of swearing, and meaning nothing by it, with her slang, and her clear brain. He had loved her before ‒ had loved her until Juliet had come and he had forgotten everything in his worship of her ‒ and he loved her again. They had been married nearly two years. Good years, fun, laughter, splendid times; and now, lately, old things had begun to tug at his heart and hurt again. The old longing, the old sense of loss, had swept over him and ruined everything.

  ‘Old unhappy things’ ‒ he pressed his finger-tips against his eyes as if to blot out something which he saw. Old things … He laughed suddenly.

  ‘I deal too much in old things,’ he said, ‘my mind turns too often to them. I won’t deal in them out of work hours. I’ll have what’s new and fresh and young. Let Como be as blue as it may, let the sun blaze down on that marble faun I found and put in the garden to surprise her, let her be a great singer, a beautiful woman, it’s nothing to do with me. My life there ended. I’m making my own life here! I can’t, I won’t live in dreams, I’ll make a grand reality.’

  He opened the big tortoiseshell box, took out a cigarette and realized that his hands were shaking. Impatiently he lit the cigarette and threw the match away, then, turning, walked from the room and ran upstairs.

  The door between his room and Viva’s was open, and he could see her, seated at the dressing-table, polishing her nails with a huge buffer.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  She looked up, said, ‘Oh, it’s you! Yes, you’ve got plenty of time. Where’s the little Frenchman?’

  ‘Gone to prepare for the festivities. You didn’t expect me to bring him up, did you?’

  ‘Little oddity. Is he really Olympia’s lover? Seems impossible.’

  ‘I believe so. He’s a bit of a Don Juan in his way.’

  ‘A bit,’ Viva said, ‘pretty small bit!’ She picked up some small steel instrument and concentrated on her first fingernail, then said: ‘You were mother’s little ray of sunshine this afternoon, weren’t you?’

  Emmanuel dabbed his cigarette out in one of her ridiculous little ash-trays before he answered.

  ‘I came up to tell you about that,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been a bit gloomy lately. Viva. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Gloomy, darling,’ she said, ‘that’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘I think I might let up on the work for a little. We’ll go out more, see more people, do a lot of shows.’

  She laid down the buffer and twisted round in her seat so that she faced him. Her vivid face with its slightly impertinent nose and bright eyes was very serious. She looked at Emmanuel, tall, and grave, with his dark hair that would one day be the same pure, dead white that old Emmanuel’s had been. She met his dark, almost melancholy eyes, saw his well-cut sensitive mouth, with its trace of fullness about the lower lip. She noticed his whole air of distinction ‒ rather elaborate distinction, with little signs of what ought to have been affectation, and yet in Emmanuel never seemed to be ‒ and thought what a good-looking man he was, and how much she liked him.

  ‘That will be nice,’ she said, then added abruptly: ‘I like being with you better than anyone. Still love me, Emmanuel?’

  ‘Yes, you know that I do. You don’t need to ask.’

  She sighed contentedly and resumed her work with the nail buffer.

  ‘My mother thinks that we ought to start a family,’ she said, her eyes still on her work. ‘She says that it’s a Jewish trait to want children. She advises a couple ‒ quickly.’ Without turning towards him, she glanced in the looking-glass and caught sight of his reflection, saw that his pale face flushed suddenly.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘did she?’

  ‘Do you want children, Emmanuel?’

  ‘I ‒ I don’t know,’ he stammered a little; ‘I haven’t thought about it. Do you, Vi?’

  ‘Me? I should hate having them! I might like them when they were here. I’m not terribly keen, I only felt it my duty to ‒ offer!’

  He said gravely: ‘I should loathe you to do anything from a sense of duty.’

  She turned and made a face at him. ‘Angel, don’t get all serious and sanctimonious about it. I’d hate the title to go to Julian and his brats! If there was only Bill, I wouldn’t bother. Well, we’ll leave it at that, shall we? Only if mother begins to talk to you about the joys of family life, don’t let her own ‒ I mean father and Walter ‒ put you off. There, cut along, my sweet, and get dressed. I’m streets ahead of you!’

  He came a little nearer, slipped his hand under her chin and turned her face up to his. Looking down, he smiled at her and watched her mouth curve into an answering smile.

  ‘Kiss me!’ she ordered.

  ‘I was just going to.’

  ‘Kiss me and promise to be good in future and not gloom!’

  ‘I promise.’

  That night Emmanuel made a supreme effort to be gay. He danced and tried to forget how tired he was, he accepted invitations to go here, there, and everywhere with Viva, and made himself charming to both the Foreign Contingent and the Americans.

  Gradually he began to feel that he had awakened from a dream, that in truth he had been allowing something which was past and over to terrify him. Life was a good business, he had everything a man could wish for, and at twenty-nine already held a position which made him financially sound. His work interested him, he was known to be one of the rising men in his special line, and already the old dealers, Marcus Arbuthnot, Jacob Lane, and Augustus Morris, declared that his methods, his knowledge and his determination were legacies from his grandfather, old Emmanuel.

  Once, dancing with Viva, he asked, ‘Happy, darling?’

  ‘Frightfully! You?’

  ‘Astonishingly ‒ no, not astonishingly. Naturally! I’m married to you.’

  She laughed softly. ‘I adore you when you put three “r’s” where Englishmen put one! Will you rob and murder your great grand-aunt Carolina Jaffe and give me her pearls?’

  ‘Poof!’ he said. ‘They’d take years to get the colour right. Wait until next year, I’ll give you better ones.’

  Later, when he stood talking to his mother, he kept repeating silently that everything was all right. It had been good to talk to Louis ‒ Louis, who was looking magnificent and slightly reminiscent of the Rue de la Paix; it had laid the ghosts, it had established him again.

  Angela said: ‘You’re looking better, Emmanuel. Nice evening?’

  ‘Lovely, darling. You and Max have excelled yourselves.’

  She said: ‘I wonder if you could tear yourself away and take me down for something to eat ‒ sandwiches or something?’

  ‘My dear, I’ll cut any young thing’s dance to do that!’

  Angela sipped soda-water and pretended to nibble a diminutive sandwich. Emmanuel thought, ‘She didn’t want to eat or drink. She wanted to talk to me alone. I wonder what it is?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘finish acting, and tell me what it’s all about. I’m curious.’

  She drummed with her fingers on the table for a moment, then said, ‘It’s about you, Emmanuel.’

  ‘What have I done? Offended one of the Hirsch clan?’

  ‘No, darling, you’re always charming to them ‒ and why not? It’s ‒ it’s about a letter I’ve had, from’ ‒ she broke off and her eyes, distressed and worried, met his ‒ ‘from Juliet.’

  A voice that did not seem to belong to Emmanuel Gollantz said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s a very nice letter,’ his mother went on. ‘I don’t think she could write a letter that wasn’t nice ‒’

  Emmanuel said sharply: ‘We’ll take that as read, shall we? What’s it ab
out. Tell me.’

  ‘She’s coming to London. She wouldn’t come last year, and now she says that it’s impossible to avoid doing so ‒ or practically impossible. She’s singing twice at the Albert Hall, once at the Queen’s and once for the Claytons in Belgrave Square.’

  ‘When? What are the dates?’

  She fumbled in her bag and produced a card on which four dates were scrawled in pencil, and handed it to him, saying: ‘The tenth, the twelfth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth.’

  ‘Next month?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she mention me?’

  ‘She wanted you to know in plenty of time, in case you didn’t want to meet her by accident. You know how one runs into people.’

  Emmanuel held the card in his long, sensitive fingers, then tore it carefully into very small pieces, dropping them into the glass which had held his champagne.

  ‘Then she doesn’t want to meet me?’ he said. ‘She needn’t worry. She wants to see me no less than I want to see her, believe me. If you write, say that I shall be in Paris on those days ‒ with Viva. We’re going for a holiday.’ Then, changing his tone: ‘Shall we go back, dearest? Viva’ll wonder where I’ve got to.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘Like to go to Paris with me?’ Emmanuel said. ‘I thought of going over on the eighth.’

  Viva looked up from the letters which she was opening, strewing the envelopes all over the bed, to where he stood at the foot of it. Viva never ate breakfast; she drank a tumblerful of orange juice. Emmanuel broke his dry toast and drank his coffee alone in the ultra-modern dining-room that his taste and Viva’s had only just saved from banality. He had come up to say good morning to her, and found her immersed in her letters. Emmanuel always wondered why so many people wrote to Viva. She never seemed to write letters herself, seldom sent telegrams, and never answered the telephone if she could avoid doing so.

  ‘I don’t want to go to Paris,’ she said, ‘if it means trailing curious people who have a table to sell round with us.’

  ‘It doesn’t. I’m going for a holiday.’

  ‘In November! It’s going to be damned cold, angel.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a new fur coat.’

  ‘I’d rather have jade, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘Jade,’ he repeated reflectively. ‘I believe that old ‒’

  Viva stopped him. ‘Emmanuel, don’t! Don’t tell me that old Something-or-Other has a lovely string that belonged to the Dowager What’s-her-name, because I can’t bear it. I want modern jade, not some that Noah gave his wife when they sailed. I hate old things.’

  ‘You shall have the most modern and horrible jade Paris can produce. Now ‒ are you coming with me?’

  ‘On the eighth? Yes ‒ oh, wait, we’ve got the Claytons’ party on the fifteenth. We shall have to be back for it.’

  With an air of slightly overdone unconcern, Emmanuel said: ‘I don’t want particularly to go. Their parties are pretty dull.’

  ‘Frightfully exclusive. I’ve had to imperil my immortal soul to get asked to this one. It’s taken me months of civility to old Mother Clayton. I had to talk about Bach for half an hour. I never know a thing about Bach except that he wrote a thing called a Toccata and a lugue on his own name, called G-sharp H.’

  Emmanuel laughed. ‘Why go, then? You don’t like music much.’

  ‘Idiot, everyone likes music. Especially if it’s expensive. It’s like caviar and truffles and things. If you don’t like them, it argues that you can’t afford them, and they’re just sour grapes. Well, if we’re back, we’ll go, and if we aren’t back we’ll send a frightfully costly telegram, beginning, “Dear Mrs. Clayton”, to say that you’ve found a Rubens in a back street and have been laid out with shock. All right, Emmanuel, the eighth. Lovely.’

  He walked to Bond Street, congratulating himself that it was arranged, and that when Juliet Forbes arrived in London he would be on his way to Paris with Viva. He’d been a fool to get worried over it. ‘What’s Hecuba to me?’ It was over and done with, and he was having a devil of a good time. Viva and he were going everywhere. He was dancing a lot, and jolly good exercise it was too. Only in the mornings he felt fagged. Three and four in the morning, and the office at ten, didn’t give one a lot of time for sleep. Not that he did sleep awfully well. After dancing a lot, he found that the tunes went on and on in his head. Such damned silly tunes too, as silly as most of the songs one listened to. People said, ‘How divine! It’s the most wonderful tune!’ and all the time it was just a stupid reiteration of a phrase from some half-forgotten negro melody. He never heard any music now ‒ and quickly he added, mentally, that he didn’t want to. It was too drugging, a dangerous narcotic. Music and scents were terrible things for dragging you back. Violets always took him automatically to Ordingly in the spring, brown Windsor soap to the change room at school, a bean-field to the road which led to Juliet’s villa at Como …

  He blinked his eyes, as if to close the shutter of his mental camera and make it impossible for more pictures to be made. He didn’t want to remember the villa or anything to do with it. Italy was an over-rated country anyhow. Colour, sunshine, and people thought that made up for the dust and the heat. He’d never go back there, never!

  Hannah Rosenfelt came into his office with his letters. Max never arrived until late, and Emmanuel only reserved special and highly important letters for him.

  ‘Anything important?’ Emmanuel asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. The usual half-dozen people enclosing amateur photographs of bits of furniture and asking what you would be prepared to offer for them. It’s only a way of getting a cheap valuation. Do you remember how at first you used to spend hours trying to find out what they were worth? Now I just send back a form saying that it looks very interesting, but that we are overstocked in that particular line.’

  ‘Horrible expressions!’ Emmanuel said, ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘The catalogue of the Earl of Howark’s pictures and furniture on the fourteenth,’ she said. ‘There’s some wonderful stuff, Mr. Emmanuel. I suppose Sir Max will go. Arbuthnot’s manager told me that they’re after the Reynolds for Glassons of New York.’

  Emmanuel smiled. ‘I think they’ll find that Gollantz’s are after it for England,’ he said. ‘My father’s determined to have it.’

  She flicked over the pages with her well-kept, square-tipped fingers. Emmanuel liked Hannah Rosenfelt. She had been first employed by his grandfather, when she left school. She had kept the stamp book, then had been raised to a clerk’s status, and now for some years had been secretary to his father and himself. She was a handsome woman in a very pronounced Semitic style, growing a little heavy as she grew older, but her vitality was as unimpaired, and her keenness in her work and the interests of the firm were as great as ever.

  Emmanuel watched her in silence, his eyes heavy for want of sleep. She stopped turning over the thick, beautifully printed pages and looked at him.

  ‘You’re doing too much,’ she said. ‘You’re tired out.’

  ‘Only a headache. Got an aspirin, Hannah?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll get one ‒ two. I should think you could take two? I’ll send out for a cup of strong coffee.’

  ‘No, no. I don’t want coffee.’

  But she had gone, and he sat idly turning over the letters, reading them mechanically, making pencil notes at the bottom of each. It all seemed deadly uninteresting, and not even a packet of sketches which had come up from the Camden Hill studios held any real interest for him. Letters from Beaumont, who was travelling in Spain and had discovered, so he said, marvels of old brocade. ‘Too lovely,’ he wrote, ‘like sunsets, spilt wine, and half-dead roses.’ Emmanuel grinned. Beaumont always wrote in that style. How Max hated it! He scrawled on the bottom, ‘Say that his prices are all right, but that his language is too expensive.’ Craddock wrote from somewhere in Albania that he could buy in small quantities some special wood which he had never seen before. ‘Appears to
be excellent. Suggest whole quantity. Admirable for inlay. Polish high. Consider worth money asked. Wire reply.’ Craddock always wrote letters in telegraphese, and telegrams like three-volume novels.

  It struck Emmanuel as he sat there, with the letter from Albania before him, what a lot of them there were in the firm. Old Emmanuel had come from Vienna bringing with him all the stock he possessed. He had started with one house on Camden Hill. His grandson doubted if he even employed a single man regularly in those days. Now, after sixty years, Gollantz and Sons employed an army of men. Carpenters, designers, painters, men who knew how to restore and restore beautifully, upholsterers, polishers, and packers. Experts in wood like Craddock, experts in materials like Beaumont, accountants like Davis, book-keepers, clerks, commissionaires, office boys, cleaners, to say nothing of the minor specialists like Brown, who could find door-handles and keyhole mounts in old rubbish shops, and knew at a glance their age and worth. And over them all, the greatest specialist of them all, Max Gollantz himself. Max, who carried on the tradition of the house and had never descended to any business which was not honest and above-board. If Max said, ‘Genuine’, that was sufficient, but where the slightest doubt existed, Max set his face against either insinuation or doubtful dealing.

  ‘Don’t you neffer advertise, Mex?’ old Jacob Lane asked.

  ‘Every day of my life,’ Max said. ‘Every time we sell anything.’

  Arbuthnot, who always talked like an Englishman of the ’nineties, said:

  ‘By Jove, Max is the good boy of the trade. The day that I can get my people to make a fake piece and persuade Max to sell it as genuine, I shall retire. I shall have earned a rest.’

  But they none of them resented it, and they liked Max as they had liked his father. He was less spectacular, he was not in the least flamboyant, he was sound as the English oak which he had made so popular, and they knew it.

  Hannah returned with the coffee and set it down at Emmanuel’s elbow with a scrap of paper on which reposed two white tablets.