The Hearts and Lives of Men (12 page)

Angie’s father rang from Johannesburg and boomed down the line, “Glad to see you’re rid of that no-good wife of yours. It’ll cheer Angie up no end!” Which of course it did. That, and the amazing success of David Firkin’s paintings, which now hung on the trendiest walls in the land.

“See,” said Angie. “All that Old Master junk is out, out, out.”

At the custody proceedings, a month later, Helen was to wish she had fought harder. Clifford brought up various matters to prove her unsuitability as a mother; not just her initial attempt to abort Nell, which she had expected, but her father’s insanity—a man who cut up his own paintings with the garden shears could hardly be called sane—which she might have inherited, and Helen’s own tendency to gross sexual immorality. Moreover, Helen was practically an alcoholic—had she not attempted to justify her sinning with the co-respondent, Durrance, on the grounds that she’d had too much to drink? No, Nell’s mother was vain, feckless, hopeless, criminal. Moreover, Helen had no money; Clifford had. How did she mean to support a child? Had she not given up even her meager part-time job at the drop of a hat? Work? Helen? You’re joking!

Whichever way the poor girl turned, Clifford faced her, accusing, and so convincing she almost believed him herself. And what could she say against him? That he wanted Nell only to punish her? That all he would do would be to hand Nell over to the care of a nanny, that he was too busy to be a proper father to the child, that her, Helen’s, heart would break if her baby was taken away from her? Edwin Druse was not persuasive. And so Helen was branded in the eyes of the world, a second time, as a drunken trollop, and that was that. Clifford won the custody proceedings.

“Custody, Care and Control,” said the Judge. Clifford looked across the courtroom at Helen, and for the first time since the proceedings had begun actually met her eyes.

“Clifford!” she whispered, as a wife might whisper her husband’s name on his deathbed, and he heard, in spite of the babel all around, and responded in his heart. Rage and spite subsided, and he wished that somehow he could put the clock back, and he, she and Nell could be together again. He waited for Helen outside the court. He wanted just to talk to her, to touch her. She had been punished enough. But Angie came out before Helen, dressed in the miniest of mini leather skirts, and no one looked at her legs, just at the gold and diamond brooch she wore, worth at least a quarter of a million pounds sterling, and tucked her arm into his, and said, “Well, that’s an excellent outcome! You have the baby and you don’t have Helen. Laurence wasn’t the only one, you know,” and Clifford’s moment of weakness passed.

What happened to Laurence, you ask? Anne-Marie his wife forgave him—though she never forgave Helen—and they remarried a couple of years later. Some people are just unbearably frivolous. But by her one act of indiscretion Helen had lost husband, home and lover—which happens more often than I care to think—not to mention a child, and a friend, and a reputation too. And when Baby Nell took her first steps her mother was not there to see.

P
OOR CLIFFORD! NOW, READER,
you may be surprised to hear me speak thus sympathetically of Clifford, who has behaved to Helen in a cruel and disagreeable way. She had been silly, it was true, but she was only twenty-three, and Clifford, within a month or so of marriage, had been paying more attention to Leonardo’s than to her, and she had been made jealous of Angie, as we know, and Laurence was as dark and mirthful as Clifford was fair and serious, and Laurence tempted her, and she had failed to resist temptation, just once, though it must be faced that the episode on his office couch might well have blossomed into something richer and less sordid, left to its own devices, and without Anne-Marie’s furious hammer-blows to the relationship. Many another husband would have forgiven his wife for just such an error, sulked and grieved for a month or so and then forgotten, and just gotten on with life. Not Clifford. Poor Clifford, I say, simply because he could
not
forgive, let alone forget.

Poor Clifford, because even though he hated Helen, he longed for her bright presence around him, and was left with Angie, who wore miniskirts although her legs were bad and unfashionable brooches just because they were worth millions, and whose white mink coat seemed ostentatious rather than warm and becoming. And who, if Clifford tried to exercise the quite reasonable rights of the newly divorced man, and play the field a little—and there was no shortage of intelligent, beautiful and charming women waiting to snap Clifford up—would ring up her father in Johannesburg (never using her own phone) and start persuading him to shift his investment out of the uncertainties of the Art World and into the certainties of The Distillers’ Company or Armalite Inc. So, poor Clifford! He was not happy.

And poor Nell, who had to get used to new faces and new ways, for now she lived in a great polished nursery with a nice enough Nanny and a doting grandmother and grandfather to visit her—but where was her mother? Her little lower lip quivered quite a lot, in those early days, but even a baby can be brave and proud; she would make an effort to smile and perform, and who around was there to fully appreciate her loss? The ins and outs of a child’s psyche were not so discussed and considered then as now.

“Don’t pick her up,” Cynthia would say to Nanny, on the rare occasions when Nell cried in the night. “Let her cry herself out. She’ll soon lose the habit.” That was the way she’d reared Clifford, after all, in the manner of the times; and sure enough, Clifford had learned not to give way to grief or fear, but whether it had done him any good was another matter. Fortunately Nanny had been trained in Dr. Spock, and took no notice.

“Just as soon as I can get it together,” Clifford said to his mother, “she’ll come to live with me.” But of course he was busy. Weeks turned into months.

And still poorer Helen! She lived with her parents in the months following the divorce, and it was not easy. John Lally was gaunter than ever with all-pervasive rage, and I-told-you-so’s, and inclined more than ever to blame Helen’s mother for everything that had gone wrong, that was going wrong, and was about to go wrong. Evelyn’s eyes would be red and puffy every morning and Helen knew that this too was her fault. She could hear him through the wall.

“Why didn’t you stop her marrying him, you fool? My granddaughter in the hands of that rogue, that villain, and you practically handed her over? Did you hate your own daughter so much? Hate me? Or was it jealousy, because she’s young and starting out and you’re old and finished?”

Oddly, while denying that Helen was his daughter, he laid full claim to Nell as his granddaughter. And yet, you know, while his wife and daughter grieved under his roof, John Lally, inspired by sheer spleen, painted three splendid paintings in as many months—one of an overflowing rain barrel in which floated a dead cat, one of a kite stuck in a dead tree, and one of a blocked gutter and assorted debris. All are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. John Lally owned them by contract to Leonardo’s, but was certainly not going to deliver them. No. Never. He hid them in the Applecore basement and it was lucky damp did not rot them, or rats devour them. Better his own basement, raged John Lally, than Leonardo’s vaults, where Clifford Wexford, adding insult to injury, had already put eight of his finest canvases.

Helen wept a little less each day, and after three months was prepared to face the world again. She was allowed to see her child under the terms of access for one afternoon a month, in the presence of a third party. Clifford had designated Angie as that third party, and Helen could not find any real reason to object, and Edwin Druse did not find one for her. (If you are ever involved in a divorce, reader, make sure your solicitor is not in love with you.)

T
HIS WAS HOW THE
access afternoon would go. Nell’s grandmother Cynthia would bring the child up to Waterloo on the train, where Angie, a daily nanny of her choice (whose face changed frequently) and a chauffeur-driven Rolls would be waiting. The daily nanny would hold Nell, since Angie was nervous of carrying so lively and bouncy an infant. Besides, it might wet. The party would repair to a room at Claridges, where Helen would be waiting—uneasily, for the place no longer suited her. As Clifford’s wife she could go anywhere, however grand, with ease. As Clifford’s ex-wife, it seemed to her that waiters and doormen sniggered and stared. These feelings in Helen Angie understood very well, which is why she chose Claridges. Besides, she had pleasant memories of the place.

The nanny would hand Nell to Helen, and Nell would smile and croon and chirrup, and show off her few words, as she would to any friendly face. She no longer distinguished her mother from anyone else; it was her grandmother she reached for, in alarm or pain. Helen had to put up with it.

“You
have
grown thin, Helen,” Angie said, on the fourth of these access occasions. (Cynthia had looked mysterious and glamorous, and gone shopping, or so she said.) Angie was glad enough to see that Helen’s breasts, once so plump and positive, were now diminished. She thought Clifford could hardly be interested anymore in the pathetic, timid creature that Helen had become.

“Clifford always said I was too plump,” said Helen. “How is he?”

“Very well,” said Angie. “We’re dining at Mirabelle’s tonight, with the Durrances.” Ah, the Durrances! Anne-Marie and Laurence, courting again already, once Clifford and Helen’s best friends. Laurence, with whom Helen had sinned, forgiven, because when it came to it, Helen counted for so little. Angie loved to twist knives. But this time she had gone too far. Helen stared at Angie, and her eyes grew luminous with an anger she had never felt in her life before.

“My poor little Nell,” she said to her child. “How weak and stupid I’ve been. I betrayed you!”

She handed the baby to the nanny and crossed to Angie, and slapped her, once, twice, thrice, on the same cheek. Angie shrieked. The nanny ran from the room with Nell, who merely laughed at the bouncing she received.

“You’re no friend of mine and never have been,” Helen said to Angie. “You’ll go to hell for what you’ve done to Clifford and me.”

“You’re just a nothing,” said Angie spitefully. “A frame-maker’s daughter. And Clifford knows it. He’s going to marry me.”

Angie went straight back to Clifford and told him that Helen had turned violent and persuaded him to take the access arrangements back to court and limit still further the meetings between mother and child. Angie hated the way, after she had seen Helen, that Clifford would ask, apparently casually, how Helen had seemed.

“Very ordinary,” Angie would reply. “And eaten up with self-pity. So dreary!” or words to that effect, and Clifford would look at her and say nothing, except smile ever so slightly, and not very pleasantly. It made Angie uneasy. Angie did this time encounter some considerable resistance from Clifford.

“Oh, do just shut up and lay off, Angie,” was what he said at first.

She was in fact driven to reporting (and it could be dangerous—Clifford might react unexpectedly) that Helen was having an affair with her solicitor Edwin Druse. It worked. (Helen, of course, was not, but Edwin Druse was claiming otherwise. Some men are like that—sheer fantasy gets the better of them.) To Clifford, who had noticed the singular inefficiency of Druse’s handling of Helen’s case, Angie’s assertions came as a shock but seemed all too believable. It would explain a lot. Back he went to court.

The summons came bouncing through the mail slot of Applecore Cottage.

“I told you so,” said John Lally. “I expected it.”

“It’s because you expect it,” said Helen, finding her courage at last, “that this kind of thing keeps happening!” And she accepted at last her mother’s offer of £200 (Evelyn’s own running-away money, saved with difficulty over the years) and put it down as the first month’s deposit on a fifth-floor flat in Earl’s Court. No elevator. Who cared? She would get a job. She would get her baby back.

Helen turned up in Edwin Druse’s office angry, not tearful. He felt he might be losing her. He embraced her. She broke away. He persisted. He did not quite try to rape her, but it could be interpreted as such. If he was a vegetarian it was perhaps in the hope of quelling an alarmingly aggressive nature, disguised beneath a beard and a “Hey, man” cool manner which, I am sorry to say, didn’t work. Red meat cannot be blamed for everything. Helen broke free, and found herself another solicitor.

She marched into the offices of a colleague of Van Erson, Cuthbert Way, whom she and Clifford had once had to dinner (ratatouille, veal with lemon,
tarte aux pommes
), and demanded his assistance. He would have to represent her for free, she said, in the name of natural justice. He was impressed; he laughed with pleasure at her animation. Druse’s appalling handling of the Wexford Case had been a cause for much comment up and down Grays Inn. Way was as moved by her sparkling eyes, her cheeks flushed with outrage, as Druse had been by her red-rimmed masochism. He said he would be happy to take deferred payments.

And so when Clifford went back to Court he found himself faced not by Edwin Druse but by Cuthbert Way, angry and adamant, who told the Judge that Helen had her own home now to take the baby to, and claimed that Clifford was indifferent to Nell’s welfare and wanted only revenge, and maintained that Angie was of low moral character, as indeed was Clifford—had he not been to a smart party where LSD was taken?—and in general was as unreasonable and unkind about Clifford as Clifford had been about Helen, and it worked, and when they left the court, Nell was in Helen’s arms. (The Judge had asked to see the child in chambers, in the presence of both parents. Nell crowed with delight and leaped into her mother’s arms. Well, she hardly knew Clifford. Had Nanny been there, she would probably have gone to Nanny, but she wasn’t, was she, and judges don’t think of things like that.)

“Custody to the father,” said the Judge. “Care and Control to the mother.”

“I suppose Cuthbert Way is your current lover,” Clifford hissed as he and Helen left the chambers. “Moving up the legal ladder, I see. I’ll die rather than let you get away with this.”