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

  ‘There, drink that, take those and you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Nice kind person you are, Hannah.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Emmanuel,’ she said with a faint hint of confusion, ‘one only does what one can. Now sip it, it’s very hot.’ She watched him gravely, and then gathered up the letters and turned to go. Emmanuel set down the cup and said:

  ‘I’ve not been through them all. Wait a minute. Sit down. Take five minutes’ rest yourself. How’s the house?’

  Her rather heavy face brightened. ‘Delightful. Takes no time to get to Northwood by train, you know. Why, last night I didn’t leave the Queen’s Hall until nearly half past ten.’

  Idly sipping his coffee, subconsciously wishing that his head would stop aching, Emmanuel asked whom she had heard at the Queen’s Hall.

  This new woman, Eleanora Pettrachi,’ Hannah said. ‘Not very good. Showy, but no feeling. Like an expensive gramophone record only not so good. I waited, always believing that I should hear something worth hearing ‒ but it never came. Over-advertised and over-trained. There, you’ve finished the coffee, the head will be better soon. Could you look at the rest of the letters now?’

  They had just finished the letters when a knock came to the door, and when Emmanuel called, ‘Come in,’ one of the junior clerks entered with the news that Sir Max had arrived. Emmanuel got up, pushed the letters over to Hannah Rosenfelt and said:

  ‘That’s good, we’d just finished. I’ll go and see my father, and we’ll ring through for you when he’s ready.’

  Max sat in his own huge office, his foot resting on a footstool, his face rather haggard and yellow. It was one of fate’s jokes that Max Gollantz, who had never abused any of the good things of life, should periodically be smitten with gout. Emmanuel knew the signs and prepared to be sympathetic. ‘Good morning, sir. Not so well. Foot again?’

  Max drummed with his finger-tips on the big desk which had once belonged to Benjamin Disraeli and nodded.

  ‘No sleep. It’s ‒ well, it’s fairly bad, Emmanuel. Angela wants to carry me off to Aix for a cure. It’s intolerable, cuts into one’s work so badly.’

  ‘I should say get away, nothing does you so much good.’

  Max moved impatiently in his big chair. ‘How can I get away? It’s impossible at the moment. Howak’s sale on the fourteenth, and we want the Reynolds too much to let it go to America. No, no, I can’t go yet.’

  With a feeling that his tone was half-hearted, Emmanuel said that he could bid for the Reynolds. Max looked at him, under heavy lids, and smiled.

  ‘Good fellow you are,’ he said, ‘but it’s scarcely fair. Too much responsibility. We work you too hard as it is, my boy. No, I shall be all right. Nothing to worry about.’

  Then a sudden twinge of pain caught him and he sat rigid, his face very white, and when the paroxysm was over, wiped away the sweat from his forehead. Emmanuel reflected that his father never cursed as most men did; rather, he seemed to offer an apology for even allowing his pain to be manifest. ‘Anything in the post?’

  ‘Mine was dull enough in all conscience,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Hannah may have some plums for you. Shall I ring for her?’ Max nodded, and when Hannah entered, Emmanuel went back to his own office.

  Angela came in just before one, and came direct to his office. She was obviously worried, and Emmanuel, who loved his mother with a queer unobtrusive devotion, noticed it at once. She sat down, obviously prepared to talk to him.

  He stood by her chair, looking down at her, wondering how at fifty she still managed to remain one of the most attractive women in London.

  She sighed. ‘Emmanuel, I’m worried about Max. I want to get him away. This gout is more serious than it seems. Bernstein has tried everything, and he himself told me that he gets alarmed. You see, Max never tells anyone the whole truth. He pretends, he says what he thinks will please me. Max’s heart isn’t what it might be.’

  Emmanuel laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘Then take him away, darling. Aix always does him good.’

  ‘I know, but ‒ but you wanted to go to Paris, didn’t you?’ Taken off his guard, Emmanuel gave a short exclamation of dismay. He had forgotten Paris, and Juliet Forbes. But this was Angela who was worried, and it had become a habit with him to push everything aside, to throw over all his personal inclinations if they affected his mother adversely. Emmanuel might be weak, he might vacillate, his stability might be questioned, but his love for his mother remained the unchangeable thing in his life.

  ‘Paris?’ he said. ‘What’s Paris compared with your peace of mind about Max! Nothing!’

  After all, London was big enough. Surely he need see nothing more of Juliet than her name on the bills.

  His mother looked up at him, then suddenly caught his hand and pressed it against her cheek. For a moment they remained very still, Emmanuel feeling nothing except delight that he had pleased her, lightened her worry a little.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘people count me a happy woman, and yet I seem to myself to do nothing but sacrifice you for other people. It’s not fair, and yet what can I do? I can’t let Max get worse and worse when I know, and Isadore Bernstein knows, that Aix will do him good. I wonder that you don’t begin to hate me, Emmanuel.’

  He bent down and kissed her. ‘Angel,’ he said, ‘you’re getting everything distorted. I can very well stay in London. It’s sufficiently big to hold ‒ Juliet and myself. I’ve grown more sensible lately. Viva and I are having a glorious time, and nothing can touch me!’

  She laughed, rather miserably. ‘I ought to have called you Ajax, I think. Oh, my dear, don’t be worried, don’t be afraid. If you are really happy, cling on to it, conserve it. It’s so much of it my fault. I ought to have let you stay and marry her. Only my courage failed me, I was weak and conventional.’

  Emmanuel laid his finger-tips on her mouth, very gently, the touch was a caress in itself.

  ‘S-sh,’ he said, ‘I won’t have you speak so. I tell you it’s over, that I’m very happy, and that I shall go on being happy. Forget it all, take Max to Aix. I’ll buy the Reynolds, and we shall all be happy ever after.’

  So that afternoon it was arranged that Max should go to Aix for a month, and that Emmanuel was empowered to bid an enormous figure for Sir Joshua’s painting of ‘Persis, Lady Granton’.

  When he told Viva, she shrugged her shoulders and said that she expected it.

  ‘You are all bound to that family machine,’ she said, ‘and it’s a juggernaut that crushes you all. You can’t even go to Paris for a holiday but the machinery catches you up and whirls you off to salerooms. Oh, I don’t really care. London is sufficiently amusing at the moment.’

  ‘I could manage from the eighth until the thirteenth ‒ no, with Max away, I should have to be back on the eleventh. Oh, damn!’

  Viva said, ‘Quite ‒ that’s what I often say ‒ “Oh, damn”, but it never cuts any ice.’

  Emmanuel’s nerves snapped. He was tired. Max had left for Ordingly immediately after luncheon. Reuben Davis had been quibbling about some wretched account of three pounds seven and eightpence which the upholstery claimed ought to be met by the polishing department. Hannah had defended the polishers, and Reuben had argued about principles and precedents until they had nearly driven Emmanuel crazy. Then Julian had blown in and demanded a loan from petty cash of a couple of pounds, because he had left home with no money, and Hannah had looked frosty, and Julian had been slightly impertinent, and finally Emmanuel had said, ‘Damn the petty cash ‒ here you are, Julian!’

  He swung round on Viva, and for once let his temper get the better of him.

  ‘Confound it,’ he said, ‘do you suppose that I don’t want a holiday? I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for over two years. Ten to six day after day, and then this damned silly round of parties where I meet people even duller than those I meet in the office.’

  Viva laughed, and blew a smoke-ring with care, then said:

  ‘You’d better
go to Aix with Max. I should think your liver is out of order, my child. Go and dress; we’re dining with the Morrisons.’

  When he met her again just before they started she was quite unruffled and behaved as though there had been no slight storm. She talked about anything and everything, told him a very smart and slightly improper story about a mutual friend, and was evidently prepared to enjoy her evening.

  Emmanuel decided that here lay one of the main differences between himself and Viva. He remembered things, she forgot ‒ or apparently forgot ‒ them. He allowed things to sting and hurt, she assumed an armour of indifference and was protected. Her father and brother, because they both led lives which she regarded as unworthy, were simply erased from her mind. She never spoke of Sir Walter, except to express her contempt of him, and all her brother’s bouts of illness ‒ brought on, Emmanuel had to admit, by his own idiocy ‒ never roused any spark of compassion in her.

  She disliked them both, despised them both, and never wished to speak to or meet either of them. It was not that she lacked kindliness, nor that she was devoid of sympathy, but simply that she looked facts in the face and refused to allow sentiment to rule her. The fact that poor, stupid, white-faced Walter Heriot was her brother made him no more to her ‒ because of her disapproval ‒ than the casual drunkard in the streets.

  Not that there was any narrow-mindedness, or excess of conventionality, in her make-up, Emmanuel reflected. She cared nothing for public opinion, and when Nina Westernhouse had run away with Giles Kently, and had returned to London and taken a house in Chelsea, Viva had been the first person to call and behave perfectly charmingly to Giles.

  People had raised their eyebrows, and Viva had laughed.

  ‘I like Nina,’ she said, ‘and the fact that she ran away with Giles can’t make me like her less. Westernhouse was always dull, and she couldn’t stand it. I only ticket sins those nasty little failings that come out of bottles and hypodermic syringes. If I realized that I hated Emmanuel, I should leave him, and very quickly. Westernhouse was limiting Nina horribly, with his perpetual religious congresses and mothers’ meetings. It wasn’t her line.’

  Emmanuel put out his hand and laid it on hers, as they drove to the Morrisons’. ‘Sorry I lost my temper and got rattled.’

  She turned and smiled. ‘Darling, I didn’t care a hoot. Only I wish you wouldn’t repent ‒ verbally ‒ it makes me hot under the collar. It’s all right.’

  Chapter 4

  The evening started very well. Emmanuel felt that it was going to be less boring than usual. He sat next to Georgina Hardman, the actress, at dinner, and found her amusing and interesting. She was plain; she said that in her plainness lay her real success, because it titillated the palates of an audience to see a plain woman playing passionate love scenes. But her intelligence was unmistakable, and a rather tired Emmanuel found it pleasant to listen to her delightful voice uttering opinions which were neither commonplace nor unbearably advanced.

  It was later, when the dance began, that he hated the evening. Everything conspired to irritate him. Viva began by saying: ‘My poor darling, having to sit next to that hideous Georgina Hardman.’

  ‘I liked her,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Her voice is lovely.’

  Viva laughed and said, ‘Kind lad you are!’ and suddenly he felt a prig.

  Then Julian arrived, and his pretty little American wife began to talk about Eleanora Pettrachi. She talked intelligently enough, but she seemed to believe that the world had produced only one method of singing, and that the Italian. Emmanuel, trained from the time he was a child by his grandfather, and later by Angela, hated what old Emmanuel used to call ‘firevorks’, and said so.

  Julian said, ‘Have you heard this particular Brock’s Benefit?’

  ‘No,’ Emmanuel said, ‘I haven’t. I don’t like Italian singers much. I did hear that she wasn’t very good.’

  Amanda Gollantz said, ‘Well, now, that’s too bad, because I thought she was just too lovely.’

  With a lazy indifference, which ought to have warned Emmanuel, Julian asked, ‘Who told you that she was not very good?’

  Taken off his guard, Emmanuel said that Hannah Rosenfelt had told him.

  Julian’s smile widened and he turned to his wife.

  ‘Hannah Rosenfelt, darling,’ he said, ‘is not a leading musical critic, but the firm’s tame Yiddisher woman. She acts as secretary to Emmanuel and my father in her spare time, the rest of the day she spends in exchanging musical and artistic chit-chat with them both. Oh, a rare bird, Hannah Rosenfelt.’

  Amanda looked at her husband doubtfully for a second, then turned to Emmanuel with a smile that was essentially kindly. It was evident that she felt the small chill which had descended on the group.

  ‘I think that’s lovely,’ she said. ‘That’s what I call real democracy. I reckon that she’s been with you for years, Mr. Gollantz?’

  ‘A long time, ever since she left school.’

  ‘Now ‒ look at that! And she’ll be quite an old woman now?’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ Julian said, ‘Gollantz’s never employ old people. They are pensioned magnificently as soon as they grow old enough to know anything about the business. That’s why you and I are relatively paupers. The firm’s profits all go in pensions.’

  Viva looked at Julian as if she was mentally adding up the cost of his admirable clothes.

  ‘ “Relatively” is good,’ she said. ‘That’s a lovely new Bentley of yours.’

  Nothing disturbed Julian. ‘My wife’s wedding present to me,’ he said. ‘Knowing the generous Jewish proclivities of the house, I married a rich wife. That she happened to be beautiful, utterly adorable and super-intelligent were secondary reasons.’

  He turned and, slipping his arm round Amanda, began to dance. Viva watched them both in silence. Emmanuel stood feeling that he wanted nothing so much as to go home and leave them all.

  ‘I loathe your brother,’ Viva said, ‘almost as much as I dislike my own, and yet he is stimulating. I don’t wonder they like him in the House. His speeches must brighten things considerably.’

  ‘Don’t talk to him,’ Emmanuel said. ‘He only annoys you.’

  ‘I never want to.’

  Yet later in the evening, when Amanda was talking to some friends and he stood talking to Bill Masters, he saw Viva dancing with Julian, her face all alight, and heard her laughter as she passed them. Bill Masters said in his slightly heavy manner:

  ‘I’d give a devil of a lot to dance with a woman as pretty as your wife, Emmanuel. I’m not so damned old that I couldn’t still enjoy it.’

  Emmanuel said, ‘She’s the best dancer in Town.’

  Then Viva’s laugh reached them again, and he felt a rush of dislike for his brother and wondered how it was that, though Viva said she hated him, he could always amuse her. He wasn’t jealous, only he felt ‘odd man out’, and remembered that so often when he danced with her they moved in dead silence. His own thoughts went on and on in a sort of miserable circle, while Masters talked and he said ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and ‘Really’ at the proper intervals. Suddenly, Bill’s words reached him distinct and clear, and he switched his thoughts away from himself and decided that he was only indulging in self-pity, and that was the lowest of all indulgences ‒ worse than Viva’s detested ‘little sins out of bottles and hypodermic syringes’.

  ‘… The nicest women always have the most worries,’ Bill said.

  Bill believed that all women were saints, and took their worries dreadfully to heart. Viva said, ‘Bill Masters is a mental midwife to every woman he likes. He’s always telling them to set their teeth and it will be over soon.

  ‘… Take your mother. She’s miserable about Max. Going to take him to Aix. I might pop over myself and try to cheer them both up a little.’

  Bill’s cheering up, Emmanuel remembered, took the form of very good champagne and dry biscuits at eleven in the morning. He thought people rather cads who drank fizz at any other time.
r />   ‘… Aix isn’t what it was once, but there’s still a certain amount of fun to be found there. Pretty women, good fellows, and so on. They’ll be there for a month. I’m going to try to get Juliet to join them there. The four of us might make up a very jolly party, eh?’

  Juliet at Aix with Max and Angela. Juliet making a ‘jolly party’ with his mother and father and old Bill Masters. It didn’t fit somehow. It seemed to put Juliet among the last generation. To ticket her as middle-aged.

  Emmanuel said, ‘Awfully jolly.’

  ‘… When she’s finished this London business, she’s free for nearly a month. Said that she wanted a holiday, and so did Gillie. So she does ‒ Australia, America, half Europe, and London. She works too hard. God knows why ‒ she’s got plenty of money. Hast left her everything he had in the world, poor chap.’

  Leon Hast, Juliet’s lover ‒ Emmanuel felt that he had been her only lover ‒ who had left her all his fortune, his collections, his pictures ‒ everything. His mother had once said that Leon Hast was the only person she had ever hated. Hast and Bill and a man called Seyre, whom Juliet had married, went through the war together. That was how Bill got his lame leg, and Hast and this chap Seyre had gone out and got him off the wire. The war … Emmanuel thought that it seemed like the Dark Ages. Abruptly, Emmanuel said to Bill:

  ‘Did you know Juliet when she was very young?’

  Bill blinked and considered for a moment, then said: ‘I’d put her at twenty when I first saw her. In Verona, it was. The three of us were there on holiday. My God, how hot it was!’

  Throwing caution to the winds, forgetting the subsequent pain it might cause him, Emmanuel asked questions recklessly. He suddenly felt hungry, felt that he must talk to someone about her or die of starvation. It wasn’t possible to go on day after day, week after week, year after year, avoiding all mention of her, never hearing of her. He’d fought too hard and too long, and now for a time he would lay down his arms and listen, and if later it all hurt desperately, well, he would set his teeth and bear it. He glanced round the room. Viva and Julian were standing near the door. Viva was serious, but Julian, his fair head bent towards her, was laughing. A moment later they turned and went out together. Emmanuel, feeling in one moment desperately tired, almost weak, sat down by Bill Masters.