The Hearts and Lives of Men (13 page)

“Die then,” she said.

A
TUG-OF-LOVE BABY!
That’s how little Nell ended up, for a full three years. First this way, then that. First the grand, hygienic nursery in her paternal grandparents’ house in Sussex; then the less grand, frankly unhygienic bohemian house of the maternal grandparents for weekends and the fifth-floor flat in Earl’s Court during the week; then her father’s now bleak but elegant town house in Primrose Hill; then the house in Muswell Hill her mother presently shared with her new husband, Simon Cornbrook.

Let me tell you briefly how Helen met and married Simon Cornbrook; a truly decent man, if a little dull, as truly decent men tend to be. He was very clever indeed, and was in the top of his class at Oxford in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and wrote important pieces about faraway places for the new
Sunday Times
Color Supplement. Sometimes, by agreement in high places, he would write lead pieces for
The Times.
(In those days the two newspapers shared premises in Printing House Square.) He was five-foot-seven, with bright agreeable eyes in a round, owly face and though only in his late thirties didn’t have much hair, as if the sheer surge of thought within his skull made it difficult for it to keep rooted. He was, in fact, very, very different from Clifford, and that may have been his charm for Helen. That, and his kindness, his openness, his consideration, his income and his dedication to her physical and emotional comfort. She did not love him. She tried, she almost convinced herself that she did but, reader, she didn’t. She needed a man to provide for herself and Nell and protect her from Clifford and his new battery of lawyers (he had dismissed Van Erson, for allowing himself to be taken unawares). And as for Simon, he simply loved Helen, but also, I think, somewhere in his heart, assumed she would be grateful and that that would make everything work. Was he not taking on a woman with a lurid past and a ready-made baby? Though he would never have dreamed of saying so! And of course Helen was grateful. How could she not be? She really and truly appreciated her clever, kind new husband who, although a journalist, and therefore exciting, never stayed drinking late at El Vino’s, never gave her a moment’s cause for jealousy, was an attentive lover, and took her home from parties the minute she said she wanted to go. (At a party with Clifford, though dying of tiredness or boredom, she never so much as hinted she wanted to go home until he made the first move to do so.) And at the parties she went to with Simon, anyway, she found a much more down-to-earth, more agreeable, less nervy and less judgmental collection of people. They were not so smart, but much more fun.

Reader, let me not knock the Cornbrook marriage. It was pretty good, as marriages go. And Helen was lucky to find him—to be freed from the necessity of climbing five flights of Earl’s Court stairs with toddler Nell, after a day spent painting furniture in Brush Antiques, in Bond Street, then crossing London to collect Nell from her nursery, and back to Earl’s Court, exhausted—oh, the price of mother-love can be very high and marriage seem very convenient, very tempting.

Simon Cornbrook, bachelor, had bought a new house in Muswell Hill. It needed large furniture. He went to Bond Street in search of practical antiques. (Such existed there, in those days.) Bill Brush took him into his back workroom to show him the large dark-green cupboard with the red flowers upon which, it just so happened, Helen was working. She looked up at Simon, from where she crouched, and she had a streak of white paint across her cheek, and that was that, for him, if not totally for her. Helen was like that. She had such power over the hearts and lives of men, and so little over her own heart, her own life!

They were married within a month, and the house in Muswell Hill was put into joint ownership at once, and Evelyn was paid back her £200. Simon, as I say, was generous, thoughtful and considerate.

“Muswell Hill!” Clifford was heard to remark. “Helen in Muswell Hill! She must be desperate for a husband. That poor devil Cornbrook! Still, a man who sets up house in Muswell Hill deserves no better.”

Now Muswell Hill, if you don’t know it, reader, is a pretty enough place, leafy and prosperous, on the North slopes of London, with a wonderful view over the city. But it is very much a family place, a PTA place, and a long way out for someone who wants to be in the swing of things. Which of course neither Helen nor Simon wanted to be. And their very not wanting made Clifford uneasy.

So Clifford went back to the courts and claimed that Simon was a dissolute alcoholic, but the plea did not stand. (He was, the court decided, merely a journalist like any other.) And Nell stayed with her mother and smiled at them all, everyone, though at her mother most of all, and very seldom at Angie, who spent quite regular Sunday lunchtimes at Clifford’s house, but was rarely asked to stay the night—and when she was, felt it was only to keep her quiet. Which it was. Poor Angie—yes, reader, even Angie deserves pity: it is a terrible thing to love and not be loved in return—was hurt, but bided her time. One day Clifford would realize what was what, and would marry her.

Clifford’s access arrangements at the time meant that he had Nell every third weekend. The child would be delivered to his Primrose Hill doorstep on Saturday afternoons, and collected from it on Sunday evenings.

“Strange,” said Clifford to Angie, on one of those occasions when he had Nell and Angie stayed the night, “it’s only when you’re here that Nell wakes and cries.” It wasn’t true. It was just that when Angie was there he spent less time asleep and so was more likely to hear the poor child cry. She told him so but he didn’t believe it.

That night Angie wore for a nightdress a beige Zandra Rhodes ballgown ornamented with the palest gauze butterflies, but it looked rather silly in bed, and did not flatter her complexion one bit. Helen would have gotten away with it, and just looked somehow dreamlike, as Clifford could not help but think. These days he tried not to think of Helen at all, since all pleasant memory of her was instantly superseded by a vision of her in Laurence Durrance’s arms, Edwin Druse’s or Cuthbert Way’s or, worst of all, cavorting in beige satin (or such, for some reason was his vision) with Simon Cornbrook. (In fact, Helen wore one of the latter’s shirts in bed, if anything, but Clifford was not to know this.)

“You should hire a nanny,” said Angie. “Whose duty it is to wake up in the night for a child. It’s ridiculous to suppose a man as busy and important as you can possibly manage Nell without one.”

“For one weekend in every three,” said Clifford, “it hardly seems worth the expense.”

He compromised and an au pair girl was hired through an agency, and as luck would have it (Clifford’s luck, anyway) she turned out to be the daughter of an Italian count, with a degree in Art History, long wavy dark hair, and a gentle manner. Angie had no idea what they were up to, but feared the worst, and arranged to have the girl deported. (This could be done easily enough in the sixties—if foreign girls were seen to be disrupting British homes, visas would abruptly be canceled. And Angie, such was her wealth and talent, always had an influential ear around in which to whisper.) But all that’s another story, reader; and really, the ins and outs of Clifford’s love-life need not concern us too much. Let us just say that, one way and another, he frequently evaded Angie’s overseeing eye.

And Simon Cornbrook, too, really only concerns us as the man who held little Nell’s right hand on family walks on Hampstead Heath, while Helen held the left.

“One-two-three-whee!” they’d cry, swinging Nell into the air, breathless and excited. Simon it was who delivered and collected Nell from Clifford’s doorstep every third weekend. And it was under his kind, quasi-paternal aegis that Nell learned not just to talk, but to run, jump, skip, even, by the age of three, to read and write a word or so. She had a thin, delicate body, large bright blue eyes and her father’s thick blond hair—though his was straight and Nell’s waved and curled as her mother’s did. (How hard it is that it takes two to make one. No wonder arguments arise!) But Nell was happy and content and, if anything, life in the Muswell Hill house, with its spacious calm and solid domesticity, was a little too boring. (Or was it Helen who thought that, not Nell? I fear so.) Helen no longer had to “entertain” in the Wexford sense, but interesting people would come around for meals and the kitchen and dining-room were one, so that everyone would sit and drink wine and watch her cook, and she found herself not in the least nervous. Simon would have to go abroad from time to time, and she missed him—well, a little—and that was reassuring. So she lived quietly for a while and told herself that this Muswell Hill housewife was her true self. Well, she was recovering. She had been badly frightened by the world and the people in it. And Nell settled in to her once-every-third-weekend with Clifford well enough, very soon learning that though she could be as boisterous as she wished to be in her mother’s house, in her father’s she had to move sedately: otherwise something precious might get broken. If she spilled her milk in Primrose Hill it would be on some pristine embroidered tablecloth, and though no one would exactly get cross, there would be a great palaver as the cloth was removed and replaced. In Muswell Hill a sponge would just be produced—or she’d fetch it herself—and the scrubbed wooden table wiped.

And so life continued happily enough. Simon thought it was time Helen had a baby, but Helen somehow kept putting it off. The Pill—in those early days of its use a really heavy daily dose of estrogen—had changed the face of sexual politics almost overnight. Women now controlled their own fertility. Once that had been the man’s job: now it was both the woman’s responsibility and her right. And every morning Helen, knowing Simon’s wishes, and being soft-hearted and kind-natured, stared at her pill and thought perhaps she wouldn’t take it after all, but every morning she did. Until one day she woke from a particularly powerful dream about Clifford—reader, she still dreamed about him—that she was in bed with him, and he would be declaring love and she would be amazingly happy. And she felt so guilty about it she put the pill back in its packet, and then threw the whole packet in the wastepaper basket. If she had Simon’s baby the dreams might stop. She would settle down. She would forget Clifford. Within the month she was pregnant.

Angie brought news of Helen’s pregnancy to Clifford one Sunday morning. The sun streamed in through French windows; the narrow crescent, lately dilapidated, but now newly painted and gentrified, threw back light into the room in the most charming way. It shone upon one of John Lally’s paintings, of an apparently dying owl chewing a rather lively mouse, and made even that seem cheerful. Clifford wore a white terrycloth dressing-gown and drank the blackest and best coffee from the most tasteful of earthenware cups. His blond hair was thick and thatched, and Angie thought she had never seen him more handsome.

“Hi,” she said, bouncing in, all casualness, arms full of red roses, “someone gave these to me, and I can’t stand him, or them, so I thought you might like them. Where’s Anita?” (Anita was the Italian au pair.)

“Gone,” he said shortly. “Some idiot at the Home Office canceled her visa.”

“You know Helen’s pregnant,” she said, casually, as she arranged the roses in a whole parade of Liberty flower vases. (She had gotten the roses from Harrods’ flower department the previous afternoon: six dozen of them, specially ordered.) Well, Angie always got important things wrong. She thought Clifford would realize that Helen had gone from him forever, and would turn to her, Angie. But all he said was:

“Dammit. Now she’ll neglect Nell. Angie, would you mind going away? Where did you get the roses? Harrods?”

Angie left weeping, and for once Clifford did not care. Let her telephone her father, let him take as many millions as he liked out of Leonardo’s, let him close the entire Old Master Section if he so decided: he, Clifford, had other things to think about.

By the end of the month, Clifford had arranged to set up a branch of Leonardo’s in Switzerland. There is a lot of money in Switzerland and those who own it need their taste guided and, fortunately for the likes of Leonardo’s, know it. He bought himself a house, by a lake, beneath a mountain. He rented the Primrose Hill house at an absurdly inflated figure—he could, inasmuch as the area had become suddenly and irrationally fashionable. Well, of course it had! It would.

He then contacted, through Johnnie, a Mr. Erich Blotton, who specialized in the kidnapping of children.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Johnnie, not usually one to admonish.

“I know what I’m doing,” said Clifford, and Johnnie Hamilton, alas, believed him and shut up. Well, he had, after all, “lost his judgment,” as his department head put it, during a debriefing session in 1944. MI5, thinking itself very clever, had used lysergic acid to prompt its employee’s memory of an interrogation he’d suffered at Turkish hands. But he’d only blanked out even more profoundly and, worse, something in his mind seemed, regretfully, to have “blown.” But he liked animals and retained many of his former skills, so now he worked happily enough in the Wexford stables, looking after Cynthia’s horses and Otto’s dogs, a great, shambling, gray-blond man, who once had been the pride of the Allied intelligence services, but who now needed to be told what to do before he could do it, so baffling did the world appear to him. Only Clifford knew just how many of Johnnie’s remarkable skills remained, and occasionally put them to use. I won’t say “good use”—though I daresay any vocational skill is the better for being employed, even spying for one’s country, or the keeping up of seedy criminal contacts. Common sense occasionally flickered through: and if only Johnnie Hamilton had not been so dependent upon Clifford for the excitement in his life, he might have remonstrated further and more persistently. As it was, he set up a meeting between Erich Blotton and Clifford, and went back to his horses.

R
EADER, MARRIAGE IS NEVER
over, divorce or not, if love was ever involved, if there is a child of that love. Helen went on dreaming of Clifford. And Clifford, in the language of less discreet and salubrious suburbs than either Muswell or Primrose Hill, went, if you ask me, doo-lally-tap. It was as if, although he had abandoned his rights to Helen’s heart, soul and erotic being, he retained a major interest in the womb which had produced Nell. This territory had been invaded by another and his, Clifford’s, honor thereby impugned. I can think of no other reason for his behavior. Excuse there can be none.