The Rich Are Different Read Online Free PDF Page A

had come face to face with Jason Da Costa, rich, golden and successful …
    I suddenly realized that the car was stationary and that both Peterson and the chauffeur were looking at me expectantly. For five horrible seconds I could remember neither where I was nor whom I had come to see.
    ‘Shall I go in and ask for the lady, sir?’ said the chauffeur helpfully.
    Without a word I got out of the car and walked up the steps, but before I could ring the bell she had opened the door and eclipsed the past.
    ‘
Salve, venusta Lesbia!
’ I exclaimed in tolerable parody of Catullus, and we both laughed. She was wearing a long black coat which concealed her gown, and some glittery rings dangled garishly from her ears. Not only was her mouth painted a deep shade of red, but her cheeks were rouged and there was some nasty black stuff on her eyelashes. I wondered why I had decided to take her out to dinner, and came to the conclusion I must have been suffering from a premature lapse into senility. Surely only old men could want to take out vulgarly-painted little girls.
    ‘I’m afraid I owe you an apology,’ she said ruefully as we set off in the car to the Savoy. ‘I was so beastly intellectual this morning.’
    I looked at her with astonishment. ‘Miss Slade,’ I said, ‘apologize if you wish for daubing yourself with the modern equivalent of blue woad, but there’s no need I assure you, to apologize for capping a quotation of Catullus.’
    ‘Well, my father always said men hated that kind of thing—’
    ‘Doesn’t that depend on the man? What kind of men have you been meeting?’
    ‘Mostly my father. I think I have an Electra complex,’ said Miss Slade gloomily, and the remainder of the journey passed very agreeably as she expounded on her imaginary psychological troubles.
    It seemed that her father had been an English eccentric of the highest order and had practised every imaginable social vagary. In between sallies to London to drink himself under the table at the best-known twilight gathering places of the West End, he had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a whig (‘A
whig
?’ I said incredulously to Miss Slade; ‘a whig,’ repeated MissSlade in despair), campaigned for the legalization of prostitution, penetrated suffragette meetings while disguised as a woman and held chamber music concerts in the nude on the Norfolk barges known as wherries. He had also been known to disrupt matins to register his disapproval of the Church of England. He had written thirty concertos for the flute, mailed sixty-two letters to
The Times
(all unpublished), dabbled in spiritualism and had privately published a book which purported to prove that Shakespeare had been a nom de plume for Queen Elizabeth. In addition to these diverse activities he had somehow found the time to indulge in the usual shooting, fishing and sailing which were so popular with the more conventional of the Norfolk gentry, and fancied himself as a ‘decoy man’, a hunter who traps wild duck in nets with the aid of a dog.
    ‘I do understand,’ I said sympathetically as we reached the Savoy, ‘that he must have been very tiring to live with, but I don’t see why you should imagine you have an Electra complex.’
    ‘I loved him,’ said Miss Slade. ‘Surely in the circumstances that must mean I was emotionally disturbed?’
    ‘Courageous, I agree, but—’
    ‘You haven’t heard the worst of it. I had a most unnatural childhood, Mr Van Zale.’
    ‘What fun it must have been! Come along into the restaurant and tell me all about it.’
    Well oiled by the best cuisine in London, the saga of eccentricity in a Norfolk backwater unfolded with a truly Gothic splendour. Harry Slade’s first wife had been an aristocratic lady in delicate health, and from her chaise-longue she had engaged a governess to attend to her small daughter.
    ‘The governess was my mother,’ said Miss Slade apologetically. ‘My father fell in love with her and his wife rushed