Four Generations (The Gollantz Family Saga Book 4) Page 5

  Bill looked at him, his round face with the thousand little lines round the eyes concerned and anxious.

  ‘Feeling all right?’ he asked. ‘Look a bit white. It’s hot here, isn’t it?’

  Emmanuel said, ‘I’m all right.’ He was almost impatient. He wanted to ask Bill a great many questions, and he didn’t want to waste any time. It was terribly important that he should talk about Juliet at once. At any moment he might realize how stupid it all was, might gather together the remnants of his determination and change the subject. He was two people. One weak, tired, hungry for the sound of her name, for news of her, the other sensible, and refusing to give way to what was at best only a very foolish impulse.

  He said, ‘I expect that she was very lovely, eh?’

  Bill nodded. ‘Very ‒ though I don’t believe any of us knew just how lovely, except Leon.’ Then he added very quickly, as if he had been guilty of disloyalty, ‘Mind, I never thought her, never shall think her, as charming as your dear mother.’

  ‘You’ve seen her lately?’

  ‘Your mother? Oh, Juliet. Yes, I saw her ‒ where was it last? In Nice this summer. June or July, just after she got back from America. I have to see her periodically, y’know. I’m executor for Hast’s will.’ He chuckled. ‘The first real job of work I’ve ever done! But it’s a pleasure, a great pleasure. Dear Juliet. How your grandfather loved her!’

  ‘Did he?’ The grandson of old Emmanuel Gollantz sat with his hands clasping his knees, his eyes intent on Bill’s face, his whole attitude expressive of intense interest. An interest so deep, so keen, that had Bill looked at his face at that moment it would have told him that it was wiser to tell this young Emmanuel nothing more of Juliet Forbes. But Bill was looking back and seeing his own pictures, seeing a very handsome old man with white hair and skin like old, smooth ivory, his beautiful hands clasped on the handle of his stick, his fine eyes half regretful, half humorous.

  ‘Indeed he did! I remember sitting with him one night at Ordingly. He used to talk almost confidentially to me sometimes. I’d known him since I was a youngster, and he was always very kind to me. We were talking about the way she gathered up her life after Hast died, and how pluckily she started work again, and didn’t let her unhappiness break her as it might have done. He said, “Beel” ‒ he never quite lost his accent, y’know ‒ “I haven’t loved many vimmen. Not nearly so many as people have believed. The woman I merrit, and Anchela. You t’ink that ‒ even at seventy-nine, I’m in love with Juliet Forbes. You’re wrong.” As a matter of fact, I did think that he was ‒ well, a bit sentimental over her, and I’m damned if I blamed him either. He went on to say that only his dislike of looking foolish prevented him asking her to marry him. I said, “Why foolish?” He said, first ‒ if he asked her and she turned him down, he’d look foolish in his own eyes. He was half laughing, pulling my leg a bit; if she accepted him, he’d look foolish in the eyes of everyone who knew that he was nearly eighty.

  ‘I said that was he certain that he wasn’t a bit in love? He shook his head and said, “No, Beel, no. But I like lovely vimmen, like them too well ‒ partly from an artistic point of view ‒ to like to see them knocking about the world with no one to look efther them.” I said that the modern woman didn’t need looking after. He said, “You’re right, but they want it just the same, and vimmen ought to have everyt’ing they want. Alvays remember that, Beel. It’s a duty and a pleasure.” He said she’d never had anyone to look after her ‒ I say, isn’t this very boring for you, Emmanuel?’

  ‘No, go on, go on.’

  ‘He said that Seyre ‒ the chap she married ‒ smothered her in cotton wool heavily scented with lavender water. He always disliked both Seyre and his work. He said Hast made a velvet-lined case for her and scented it with patchouli.’ Bill broke off and looked suddenly distressed. ‘I say, I ought not to have said that. It was unforgivable. Forget it, Emmanuel.’

  Emmanuel said, ‘What is patchouli, anyway?’

  Bill’s face cleared. ‘I forgot that you wouldn’t know. I don’t suppose that any of your generation have ever heard of it. It’s a rather beastly heavy scent. Gad, how time flies! Do I seem a frightfully back number to you, Emmanuel?’ The younger man shook his head. ‘I don’t think I ever thought much about it. You are older, of course, than I am, but it doesn't matter, does it?’ He added, more insistently, ‘It doesn’t matter people being older if they think and feel as you do, or if you think and feel as they do, does it? I mean ‒’ His voice trailed off, and Bill was too absorbed in reaching for his stick to notice that he had left his sentence unfinished.

  ‘Going, Bill?’ Emmanuel’s voice seemed to have lost its colour.

  ‘I think so. I’m too old to hang around until the not-too-small hours. Good night.’

  Emmanuel rose, pushed back his chair and said with sudden sharpness, ‘How you harp on about being old, Bill! It’s idiotic. You’re not old. Anyway, it’s no great catch being young! Good night, Bill.’

  ‘Going to dance until they deliver the milk for the morning coffee?’

  ‘If I can.’

  He made his way over to where Viva stood leaning against the wall, with a cigarette in a very long holder, talking to his brother Bill.

  ‘Hello, Bill. Come and dance, Viva?’

  She shook her head. ‘This is half over, and I’ve promised Julian the next.’

  ‘Very well. The one after that?’

  ‘If you like. Where have you been? I looked for you weeks ago, and you were listening to old Masters with your soul in your eyes. I looked again and you were still listening. Was he telling you stories of the Naughty ’Nineties?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Lovely hectic stories of Merode and Otera, eh? Oh, these old warriors fighting their battles over again for the benefit of the rising generation. I don’t suppose they ever did anything very thrilling, do you, Bill?’

  ‘Might easily be more thrilling than the things the rising generation do. They’re a dull lot. The go-ier they think they are, the duller they get.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re a serious-minded young feller, and I expect all serious-minded young fellers have talked like that since Cleopatra gave parties on the banks of the Nile. Here’s Julian ‒ come on, Julian, don’t let’s waste a minute of this heavenly tune.’

  Bill came a little nearer to his brother. ‘How’s things?’

  Emmanuel nodded, his eyes following Viva and Julian. ‘All right.’

  ‘Good. Viva tells me that it’s decided that the Guv’nor goes to Aix.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lot of work for you, eh? Well, if there’s anything I can do, let me know, won’t you?’

  ‘Thanks, Bill.’

  Bill pulled down his immaculate waistcoat. ‘I’m off. Say good night to Viva for me. I meant that, Emmanuel ‒ anything. Good night.’

  Later Viva came back to him and Julian went off to find his wife. As they danced, she said, ‘Depressed, old thing?’

  He laughed. ‘No, loving dancing with you.’

  ‘Better than discussing the charms of Cora Pearl with old Masters?’

  ‘Bill didn’t mention the lady ‒ but much better.’

  Very softly she said, ‘We’re not sort of ‒ slipping away, are we, Emmanuel?’

  For a moment a kind of panic gripped him and he wondered what he could say. His throat seemed stiff, disobedient, unwilling to obey him.

  ‘Slipping away,’ he said at last. ‘No, of course we’re not. What made you say that? You’re happy, aren’t you?’

  ‘I think so ‒ I’m never very certain of anything. At this minute I’m terribly happy. The floor’s good, the band is marvellous, and you do dance divinely. But in five minutes from now ‒ I might be miserable. You can never be certain of anything except the minute you’re living in. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘I don’t know ‒ it’s not a very cheerful doctrine.’

  ‘Well, life isn’t really one long round of gaiety and fun. Th
at’s why we’ve all got to be so busy about nothing in particular. You sell and buy pictures; I dance; Walter drinks; Julian goes and talks at Westminster. None of it matters a hoot.’

  They danced on in silence, and as the music died with a long wail from the saxophone Viva slipped her arm into his and they walked slowly over to one of the long windows. She stood looking out over the quiet square where a little group of loafers stood watching the guests leave the house. She looked at her best, and Emmanuel felt a thrill of satisfaction in her smooth well-groomed head and her general air of attention to detail. But his thrill was disturbingly impersonal, and he knew it. He was watching a very attractive young woman, a young woman he liked ‒ dimly he wondered if he had ever loved her. He wanted to make her happy, he wanted to behave decently towards her, to conform to the code which he believed was part and parcel of all men who were not unspeakable; but it was all for her happiness, not for his own pleasure or satisfaction.

  She said, turning to him and looking back over her shoulder: ‘Don’t stand so far away. I can’t talk to you when you’re standing somewhere over in Hampstead.’

  He came a little nearer and together they stood in the bay of the window, the curtains cutting them off from the rest of the room. The wailing music reached them, smothered and dulled.

  ‘If ever I fell in love with someone else,’ Viva said, ‘or you fell in love with someone else, could we both be sufficiently decent to tell each other and go away and get it over, do you think?’

  Emmanuel felt that queer sense of panic again, and despised himself for answering, ‘Is it very likely?’

  ‘Very likely,’ Viva returned. ‘More than likely ‒ almost certain I should think. We’re both young, we’re both attractive, we’re quite, quite different in lots of things which we believe matter terribly. Probably they don’t, but at the moment we think they do. I’m talking in this way because I realized this evening how damned easy it would be to fall in love with Julian. Oh, I’m not in love with him. I actually dislike him and quite definitely distrust him. But it would be easy ‒ comparatively ‒ to fall in love with him. I don’t say to love him, remember. I love you, I believe that you love me ‒ but we might easily stop being “in love” at any moment.’

  Emmanuel said, ‘I rather hate to hear you talk in this way.’

  ‘I’m sure you do, that’s because you hate facing facts. You think it’s frightful bad taste for me to have chosen Julian ‒ your brother ‒ as an example. You feel I’m being just a little incestuous. Oh, face facts, Emmanuel, and tell me that if ever you fell in love you’d come to me and not pretend, not manufacture a sort of faked fidelity, when all the time you ached and longed to be unfaithful to me.’

  He said, ‘Would you?’

  ‘Come and tell you? Yes, I should. You see, I should feel that it might only be transitory. You and I may not have a lot in common. I loathe your stuffy antiques, I hate this family fetish, I detest your rather stupid pride, but there is something about you ‒ fundamentally ‒ that I like, that I really love quite a lot. That’s what will last, if we neither of us lie about it and try to pretend that it’s what is going to keep us “faithful” ‒ mentally or physically. If or when the day ‒ or night ‒ comes when I feel that I want to go off with some other man, to sleep with him, live with him, I’ll come and tell you quite frankly. And if you are wise, you’ll do the same to me.’

  Very slowly, almost painfully, he said: ‘I don’t know. I should hate it, whether it was you or me.’

  She moved impatiently, and, leaning forward, flung her cigarette out so that it fell beyond the little crowd of loafers and lay like a gleaming red eye on the dark roadway.

  ‘But can’t you see that I want you to live freely and allow me the same privilege? I don’t want either of us to go looking for lovers, but I do want us to be able to develop without a lot of imitation trappings and worn-out conventional ideas trailing behind us, hampering us. If something really big exists between us, then that will last and nothing can really affect it. You believe that?’

  He stood watching her, his face very pale, his eyes narrowed as if he tried to see very clearly. Then he said: ‘I don’t know. I’m not quick, as you are, Viva. I need time to think things over. It’s difficult for me because of that lack of quickness. I do believe that there is something very big, very lasting between us, but what I don’t know is if it would survive so big a test as the one you suggest.’

  She laughed. Viva always laughed at him when he was very serious.

  ‘Let’s leave it,’ she said. ‘It was stupid of me. I was trying to be so desperately honest. Let’s go home.’

  Chapter 5

  It seemed to Emmanuel that suddenly London was covered with placards bearing her name, and that wherever he looked the two words ‘Juliet Forbes’ met his eyes. The tenth, the twelfth, and the fourteenth. Those were the days when, by paying money, he might go and see her, listen to her, and renew all his memories, which two years’ separation seemed to have made almost impossibly vivid.

  The ninth ‒ and he wondered all day what time she would arrive, where she would stay, and if he might not run into her when he either went to lunch or left the office in the evening. He felt that Hannah Rosenfelt was something of a saviour when she brought in the letters and pointed out that the Dowager Countess of Carlington was selling off her superfluous pictures, books, and silver at Carlington Manor in Dorsetshire.

  ‘Did you think of sending anyone down, Mr. Emmanuel?’

  He glanced through the very thin catalogue; then, with a simulated show of interest, said that he believed he’d better go himself. Hannah looked down the pages as he turned them, and remarked that there didn’t seem anything very good, and it was a pity to give himself extra work. Emmanuel, hiding his anxiety to get away, persisted that you never knew in these country sales, and that he didn’t want to let anything slip. Wasn’t it the Carlingtons, he asked, who had a lot of letters written by Charles the First to the Earl of that date? Hannah didn’t know, and her lack of knowledge appeared to deepen Emmanuel’s conviction concerning the letters.

  He left home very early on the morning of the tenth and got back to London very late, his purchases consisting of two prints and a very small and exceedingly dubious Morland. One of the local dealers had spoken to him during the luncheon interval, when they had all eaten underdone roast beef in the village inn.

  ‘Mr. Emmanuel Gollantz?’ he asked, and when Emmanuel nodded, said: ‘Very like your esteemed grandfather, if I might say so. You can’t expect us to welcome you here, Mr. Gollantz. It’s got round, and every parson and doctor, every retired colonel and half-pay Navy man is believing that you’ve come down for something special. It’s going to run the prices up for old Lady Carlington!’

  Emmanuel laughed, and said something about it being an ill wind that blew no one any good. The local man came a little nearer and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper.

  ‘In strict confidence, Mr. Gollantz, was there anything you was after, particularly? Because if so the boys here would stand by you and keep it in the ring.’

  ‘That’s more than kind of you,’ Emmanuel said, ‘but candidly, I am here for a little holiday as it were, and we ‒ my father and I ‒ never work with the ring, you know.’

  Another man, who had halted near the table to listen, interjected: ‘Leave it alone, Harry. We all know about the splendid isolation of Gollantz and Son! When you’re baronets and live in the West End, you don’t need the ring.’

  Emmanuel smiled very pleasantly. ‘We’re not all baronets,’ he said, ‘only my father, at the moment; and none of us lives in the West End. Would you all allow me to finish my luncheon in peace?’ He dined at his club and got home only just before Viva entered.

  ‘Find any treasures?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing much. A couple of amusing prints, and a doubtful Morland. Where have you been ‒ you’re home early?’

  Viva sat down on the arm of his chair and, picking up his glass,
sipped his whisky-and-soda appreciatively. She handed it back to him and remarked that it was a topping drink and beat any cocktail hollow.

  ‘Have a whole one all to yourself?’

  She considered the suggestion gravely, then said: ‘D’you know, I believe I will. Not too yellow, angel, my head’s rather weak.’

  He mixed the drink and brought it back to her, thinking that it was very pleasant to be home, and that Viva was the nicest person in the world and quite the prettiest. He settled himself in his chair again and prepared to be amused by her comments on the evening.

  ‘Tell me where you’ve been,’ he said. ‘I thought this was an off evening for you.’

  ‘It was, and I decided that I’d be dutiful and go home and dine with the family. Walter’s away. He and father have indulged in one of their periodic rows, and father ordered him out of the house for being tight! At the moment father is recovering from an attack of what the doctor ‒ a diplomatic feller ‒ calls acute gastritis, and is drinking nothing but soda-water and a little diluted white wine. Old Masters was there, and he and mother talked about how lovely Gertie Millar was in Our Miss Gibbs and what a marvel Hayden Coffin was in Dorothy. They got all technical about some song called “Queen of the Something or Other”, and who wrote it, and mother offered to bet Bill seven to two that it wasn’t put in until the second night, and Bill said, “Make it six to four, because you’re bound to lose.” Oh, it was thrilling! Bill was all dolled up, gardenia and tails and an ultra-modern white waistcoat, and when I asked him why, he said that he was going to the Queen’s Hall. He said that if I liked he’d take me, as he’d got a seat for Angela, not knowing that she’d be away. Darling ‒ going to have another whisky? You’ll never be able to cope with the dealers tomorrow. No, I’m only in fun. Have it ‒ have ten if you want to.’