[4]
‘Hi!’ said Scott. ‘Coincidence – I was just about to call you!’
‘You were?’
‘Yes, it looks as if I’ll be in New York the week after next – something came up today, and I’ll have to have a conference
with Cornelius.’
‘Wonderful!’ I tried to think clearly. ‘That’s great news!’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Well, now that you mention it I feel as if I’ve been beaten over the head. Is it my imagination or does jet-lag really get
worse as one gets older?’
‘For one bad moment I thought you meant you’d been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with your father! How did he take our news?’
‘Not badly. In fact very well. That’s why I was calling, but now I know you’re coming over I’ll save the details for when
we meet. But
you needn’t worry, darling. He accepts the idea of the marriage and he’s demonstrated that he has no intention of making himself
unpleasant.’
‘Pragmatic as ever! My God, Cornelius is a smart guy!’
There was a pause.
‘Vicky? Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh yes, I’m here. Darling, I won’t keep you from your work. I’ll talk to you again soon.’
He told me he loved me and hung up.
I went on sitting by the silent phone.
(5)
‘Daddy, I’m sorry to call you at the office but I thought you’d want to know that I’ve decided to take your advice about the
trial marriage and postpone the wedding until my birthday on Christmas Eve. After eloping to Maryland with Sam and Reno with
Sebastian, I decided it was about time I had a normal family wedding in New York – no circus, nothing grand, just a low-key
family occasion with all the children present.’
All my father said was: ‘I’m glad. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. Thank you, Vicky … Have you told Scott?’
‘I’m waiting till he comes to New York.’
‘I hope he doesn’t get angry and accuse me of manipulating you.’
‘Don’t be silly, Daddy, Scott knows I have a mind of my own …’
[6]
Two weeks later I was with Scott at the Carlyle. It was early evening. His plane had arrived on time and after meeting him
at the airport I had driven to the hotel in my car, not the station wagon I used for ferrying the children around, but the
little British sports car which I so seldom had the chance to use. Scott, a nervous passenger, had emerged wan but unscathed
at the journey’s end.
‘Do you want to rest for a while?’ I asked anxiously, but he made a rapid recovery and invited me up to his suite.
Later, much later, he stretched himself luxuriously beside me on the bed and exclaimed with a new burst of energy: ‘Let’s
go out and have a celebration drink!’
‘Okay.’ I was propped up on one elbow as I dreamily smoked a cigarette
and watched the light glint on the silver in his sideburns. As he put his hands behind his head I feasted my eyes on the lines
of his shoulders and ribs, and reaching forward I trailed my index finger lightly from his mouth to his navel and from his
navel to the taut muscles of his thighs.
‘Where would you like to go to celebrate?’ I said.
‘Let’s take a few more minutes to think about that,’ he said smiling at me with hot sleepy black eyes, and drew me back to
him for another kiss.
I noticed the thickness of the hair at the nape of his neck as I caught it between my fingers, and I was again aware of the
roughness of his cheek which betrayed how much time had elapsed since his morning shave in London. His sideburns, seen at
close range weren’t slim and trim but shaggy and thick, the hairs a complex mixture of black and silver. His teeth, unstained
by nicotine, were very white; I always forgot unless I looked closely at his mouth that they weren’t quite even, the eye-teeth
being a fraction out of alignment. His mouth, sensual when relaxed, was normally hard and obstinate, his full lower lip held
in check by the thin upper lip’s unyielding pressure. Fine lines marked the corners of his eyes and hinted at past suffering
harshly suppressed. It was a strong face but not a happy one.
He started to make love. His intense concentration should have seemed unpleasantly self-absorbed but I always found it hypnotically
exciting although I was unsure why I should have been so consistently mesmerized. Part of his success could probably be attributed
to his looks, but not all; it’s an unfortunate fact of life that strikingly attractive men aren’t necessarily mesmerizing
in bed. Perhaps the truth lay closer to the fact that I wanted to be mesmerized and knew Scott could achieve this triumph
of making me relax completely. With him I knew there would be no awkwardness which might reduce the scene to an embarrassing
mess, and so his smooth, accomplished apparently indestructible competence, which might well have chilled many women, was
exactly what I needed to help me overcome my terror of making a false move and blighting the encounter by my inadequacy. I
put my trust in this machine-like control time after time and was never disappointed; yet in the final analysis it wasn’t
this mercifully impersonal competence which I found so erotic; it was the powerful release of all his pent-up emotions, the
opening of that closed, unreadable, infinitely mysterious mind.
‘Come on Mr Mystery-Man,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out and have that drink.’
‘Why am I so mysterious?’
‘You’re so different. If we were characters in a science fiction movie, you’d be the alien in human guise.’
‘If we were characters in a science fiction movie I strongly suspect I’d be the only human and everyone else would be aliens
disguised as robots!’
We laughed, dressed and made our way leisurely downstairs.
‘I’m beginning to feel like a tourist in this city,’ said Scott, hailing a cab outside the hotel, ‘so let’s pretend to be
tourists at Beekman Tower and watch the sun set behind the Manhattan skyline.’
‘Lovely, but we don’t need a cab, do we? What’s wrong with my sports car?’
‘Please! I don’t want to start the evening drinking brandy to revive me!’ he said, and we laughed and tumbled into the cab
and spent the journey crosstown kissing in the back seat like a couple of teenagers while the driver watched us in the mirror
with a jaundiced eye.
High above First Avenue in the cocktail lounge at the top of the Beekman Tower, we found a table by one of the windows which
faced west to the shining towers of Manhattan, already silhouetted against an impossibly crimson sky.
‘The lady’ll have a martini, straight up, with an olive,’ said Scott to the waiter, ‘and I’ll have …’ He paused as his mind
roamed among the vast choice available. Then: ‘Give me vodka,’ he said, ‘on the rocks with a lemon twist. And make that a
double.’ He saw me looking at him and added with a smile: ‘I’ve got to have something to wake me up! It’s rising midnight
by European time and I’ve had a busy day.’
‘I don’t know how you’re in such good shape. That westward flight across the Atlantic’s a real killer.’ I was about to say
something else when I glimpsed a dark young man sitting at a table nearby. He was with a glamorous brunette who in the old
days would have worked in Hollywood but who was now more likely to be earning a living in a New York recording studio. ‘Good
heavens!’ I exclaimed surprised. ‘There’s Donald Shine.’
Scott swivelled in his chair but the young man didn’t see us. He was too busy listening to his companion.
‘You never told me you knew Donald Shine!’
‘Didn’t I? I met him at a party Jake gave about two years ago. It was just after Shine had taken over that data processing
company.’
Scott smiled wryly. ‘He’s come a long way since then.’
This was undeniable. Donald Shine had just taken over Stamford-Hartford Reliance, one of the biggest and oldest insurance
corporations in the country, and had afterwards announced that his
company was in future to be known as Shine & General, a conglomerate specializing in financial services. Wall Street was now
watching him with the fearful fascination of a bunch of elderly rabbits cornered by a hungry young cobra.
‘Your father nearly had apoplexy when Stam-Hart Reliance fell to Shine,’ said Scott as the waiter arrived with our drinks.
‘I had him on the phone for a full hour talking about the horrors of a kid from Brooklyn giving orders to middle-aged, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant,
Ivy-League elder statesmen. The incident gave him a magnificent opportunity to sound off on all the evils afflicting the country,
and you know what your father’s like when he gets going on draft-dodgers, black anarchists and teenage drug addicts … Incidentally,
since we’re talking of your father, tell me how he reacted to the news of our engagement. I was relieved he’d decided not
to be openly hostile.’
‘Yes … You may find this hard to believe but he even came up with some sensible advice. At least I thought it was sensible.
I hope you will too.’
‘Did he ask you to postpone the wedding?’
I was startled. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘My God, don’t tell me you gave in to him!’
‘I wouldn’t put it that way,’ I said. I could feel my face becoming hot. ‘There are several advantages to marrying at Christmas.
I thought—’
‘In other words, to cut a long story short, Cornelius has manipulated you into postponing your commitment to me.’ He knocked
back his drink and flagged down the nearest waiter. ‘Another double vodka.’
‘That’s untrue and unfair.’ I felt very upset. ‘Quite apart from the fact that I’d like a quiet family wedding in New York
when you’re finally through with Europe, I think we owe it to ourselves to try a real affair instead of these unreal jet-set
interludes! I want to marry you more than anything else in the world but I don’t want you turning around later and accusing
me of pressuring you into marriage while we were still strangers!’
‘
Strangers
!’
‘Yes, strangers! We’ve had one week in New York in 1963. We’ve had one long weekend in London earlier this year and now we’ll
have a few more days in New York. Well, that’s wonderful, that’s exciting, that’s glamorous, but it’s so far removed from
normal married life that it could be a mating practice on another planet! My father wants us to live together in London this
summer and try to create a relationship
which bears more of a resemblance to marriage. A trial marriage can never be exactly the same as a real marriage, but at least
afterwards we may have more idea than we have now about what our marriage is going to be like. I’m sorry, but I think my father’s
right. It’s got nothing to do with manipulation. It’s my own independent decision.’
‘Your father’s playing for time. He’s betting on you tiring of me and breaking the engagement – or maybe just postponing it
into the new year when he’ll have a chance to fire me—’
‘Oh, I get so tired of this paranoid suspicion you two men display towards each other! Scott, you can relax. Daddy’s given
me his word he’ll never fire you, and I believe him. He’d never do anything which would permanently alienate me.’
‘Where the bank’s concerned,’ said Scott, ‘there’s nothing Cornelius wouldn’t do. Okay, what else did he promise you?’
I looked blank. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean! If Cornelius promised he’d never fire me that means you must have discussed my future at Van Zale’s.
When’s he going to retire and name me as his successor?’
‘I … I didn’t like to ask him about that—’
‘Ah, come on, Vicky! Don’t hand me that kind of crap! You asked and he told you!’
‘No, for me it was enough to know he had no intention of firing you.’
‘You don’t really think I’m going to believe that, do you? Why are you lying to me like this? Whose side are you on here,
for Christ’s sake?’
The waiter arrived with another double vodka.
‘Scott,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to lose your temper and talk to me like this you’ll only succeed in strengthening my conviction
that we should have a trial marriage. And please – is it necessary to drink so fast and so heavily? You’ve always told me
that kind of drinking never suited you.’
He picked up his glass and again drank all the vodka straight off.
I stood up. ‘I’d like to go now, please.’
He said nothing. He was looking down at his empty glass with a surprised, shocked expression as if he had found himself in
an unpleasant position but had no memory of how he had arrived there. Then he set down the glass carefully, rested his hands
on the table as if to steady himself and said with a humility which moved me because it was so obviously genuine: ‘I’m sorry.
Forgive me. That was a very stupid thing to do.’
I sat down, but during the silence which followed I was aware that
my movements had attracted the attention of Donald Shine. I did not look directly at him but out of the corner of my eye I
could see him turning to stare at our table.
‘I can think of only one reason why you should be so reluctant to tell me what your father said,’ Scott was saying evenly.
‘He must have decided to cut me out. He won’t fire me – he’ll keep me in the firm in order to maintain good relations with
you, but he’ll see I’m railroaded to some place where I can’t bother him. Where did he suggest? Europe again? No, he’d never
be content to see you disappear for a second time into Europe – always assuming, of course, that his luck deserts him and
he fails to stop our marriage. Boston? No, too near. He’d never be able to sleep at night if he knew I was only an hour away
on the La Guardia shuttle. How about California? Banking’s booming on the West Coast, and he knows you’ve always admired San
Francisco—’
‘Well, look who’s here!’
We both jumped as the long shadow fell across our table.
It was Donald Shine.
‘Scott Sullivan! Hey, how are you doing? Great to see you! Are you still battling the British or are you back in town for
keeps? He turned to me with his broadest smile, his extraordinary exuberance wrapping itself around me as if he could strong-arm
me into liking him. ‘Hi, beautiful. I forget your name but I remember you – once seen, never forgotten! You’re Cornelius Van
Zale’s daughter.’