The Hearts and Lives of Men (14 page)

“I want Nell snatched,” Clifford said to Erich Blotton, lawyer-kidnapper. Blotton’s name appeared from time to time in the newspapers, as he was censured by his profession or, occasionally, sentenced by judges. His qualifications were at the Argentinian bar, he could be found usually in an English one, he had no proper chambers, and he liked to meet his clients in pubs, when they were open, in drinking clubs when they were not. But Clifford had had him fetched by Johnnie to his office at Leonardo’s. What a handsome office it was, too, with its high Georgian ceiling, oak-paneled walls, and immense desk. And the paintings on the walls—well, never mind! But at least a million’s worth there—even at sixties prices. Clifford lounged behind the desk, feet up, wearing jeans and a white shirt and sneakers a decade before they were fashionable. He looked casual, but of course when did he ever not?

“Snatched? That’s not quite how I like to put it,” protested Mr. Blotton, who was a thin, small, apparently withdrawn man, neatly suited and with murderer’s eyes. That is to say, they were gentle and icy and interested all at once. “Never snatched. Reclaimed is a better word.” He smoked ninety cigarettes a day.

His fingers were yellow-stained, as were his teeth. His clothes were dandruffy and smelled of tobacco.

Clifford tapped his long fingers—the ones that Angie loved and Helen remembered so well—and talked about money, and offered Blotton half what he had hoped. Clifford was not generous, even in matters like these.

“I’m leaving for Switzerland on Friday,” said Clifford. “I want the child in my house within the week. Before it clicks with the mother what might be in my mind.”

The mother!
Not Helen, not Nell’s mother, not even my ex-wife, but
the mother.
Oh yes, doo-lally-tap!

And indeed, had Helen read her gossip columns properly, and understood that Clifford was going to live in Switzerland for a whole eighteen months, she would not have left little Nell at her nursery school the following Tuesday with quite so easy a mind. But she no longer read the gossip columns. She didn’t want to. Mention of Clifford upset her. And he was always in them, always being spotted here or there, just so long as it was fashionable.

“Neglectful mother, is she?” Blotton asked Clifford. He stubbed out one cigarette and started another. Tobacco was not known at the time to be a killer weed. Doctors still recommended smoking as a mild stimulant and a gentle antiseptic. Research was just beginning to show its dangers but the statistics were volubly and energetically denied by smokers and tobacco companies alike. No one wanted to believe it, so no one did. Well, only a few.

Blotton wished to think badly of Helen. He liked to snatch children with as clean a conscience as possible. We all need justification for our illegal pleasures: we shoplift because the stores make too much profit, we cheat our employers because they underpay us, betray our partners because they don’t love us enough. Excuses, excuses! Blotton was no different from anyone else, except that in a world where most things are excusable, how Blotton earned his living was, simply, unequivocally, not.

Nevertheless, he tried. Clifford, to his credit, would not play Blotton’s game. He did not deign to reply, simply offered Blotton ten percent less than he’d originally reckoned. He disliked the man quite actively.

“Twenty percent more,” he did manage to say, “if she’s smiling when she arrives.” Thus Clifford planned, quite sensibly, to ensure Nell an easy journey, by air, from her mother’s home in Muswell Hill, to his, in Geneva: that Blotton would feed the child, entertain her, reassure her and not lay an improper finger upon her.

Clifford did love Nell, reader, in his own way. He just didn’t deserve her. Helen, for all her frailty and her earlier irresponsibility, loved Nell
and
deserved her. Your writer does not mean to imply that women always make better parents than men. In some cases the opposite is true. And sometimes, even, reader, I can see that the snatching of a child from an unloving parent is the only thing that a loving parent can do—it’s just so hard to tell, in matters that give rise to such distress, when anger, fear, resentment and thwarted instincts are involved, just what our motives are. Do we act from love, as we think, or from spite? All we can really be sure of is that men like Blotton are toads. And even that is insulting to toads, whom some affect to love.

By air!
I said.
By air!
Reader, did not that send a sort of shiver through you? It should have; it did through me. Disaster, one fears, is already waiting in the wings. Most of us can never quite get used to hurtling through the air, rather than crawling more reasonably over the ground; and the more imagination we have, the more we project our scenarios of disaster ahead. And though our fears don’t stop us from flying and we talk statistics and tell ourselves we are much safer in the air than crossing the street, even seasoned air-travelers exhale in relief when the aircraft is safely on the ground again. And such visions have been seared into our communal minds! The wretched, wrecked forest site of the great Paris air disaster back in 74—I had a good friend in that one, reader—strewn with a horrible debris: clothing, bits of body—a shoe just lying there in the foreground. I’m sure it was my friend’s shoe—long, thin, buckled, never particularly flattering to her foot, but what she liked: now all that was left of her. Or the fireball of the space shuttle, seared into the mind’s eye forever, startlingly beautiful yet without symmetry, as if in a split second some new art form had been developed—

Well! What was to be, was to be. Johnnie it was who picked up Nell from nursery school at 11:55 on Tuesday morning. He was driving the Rolls, a reassuring kind of car.

“I didn’t know it was her father’s day to fetch her,” observed Miss Pickford, who didn’t approve of divorce. Well, who does? But it was rarer then than now, when it is the way in which one in three marriages ends. But Miss Pickford let Nell go in the Rolls, though she’d been expecting Helen. Why should she not? She knew Johnnie; he collected Nell from time to time. How easily it was done! Money for jam for Mr. Blotton.

Little Nell climbed into the back seat—she loved the soft spaciousness of her father’s car. Her stepfather’s Volvo was lighter and brighter and she liked that too, but her father’s car was more exciting. Nell loved just about everything: it was in her nature to rejoice, rather than to find fault. She took a dislike to Mr. Blotton, though, sitting huddled on the other side of the backseat.

“Who are you?” she asked. She didn’t like his eyes: gentle, icy and interested all at once.

“A friend of your father’s.”

She shook her head at him in disbelief and after that he didn’t like her either. He didn’t like her bright quick eyes, nor the judgment in them.

“Where are we going?” she asked, as the Rolls took the road to Heathrow.

“To stay with your Daddy. He’s got a nice new house with a swimming pool and a pony.”

She knew it wasn’t right. “Mummy will miss me, and who will feed Tuffin?” Tuffin was her cat.

“Mummy will get used to it,” said Erich Blotton.

I think he must have liked the thought of women crying, and of children lying awake and silent in strange beds.

Nell knew she was in danger but not quite what it was. She felt in her pocket for her emerald pendant. Well, her mother’s emerald pendant. Just a tiny emerald, heart-shaped, set in gold, on a thin gold chain. It made her feel safe, though guilty. It was very bad of her to have it in her possession at all and she knew it.

“Tomorrow’s treasure day,” Miss Pickford had said to the children. “Bring in your treasures, so we can all see them and talk about them.”

Nell had asked Helen what a treasure was, and Helen had brought out the emerald pendant. Clifford had given it to her the week after their wedding. It had belonged originally to Cynthia’s mother Sonia, Nell’s great-grandmother. Clifford had lately asked for it back, through his solicitors, pointing out that the pendant was a family heirloom and, since Helen was no longer part of the family, she had no claim to it. But Helen had refused to give it back and, for once, he had not pressed the matter. Perhaps he too remembered the spirit in which it had been given, in which it had been received—that same excellent, loving spirit which had created Nell herself? Anyway, Nell now had the thing in her pocket. She had taken it from her mother’s jewel-box to show it at school, knowing she would take good care of it, believing she would put it back and no one ever know. Her best, hers and Helen’s greatest treasure, Clifford’s gift. When it came to it she hadn’t shown the pendant; she was not quite sure why.

“And where’s
your
treasure?” Miss Pickford had asked, and Nell had just shaken her head and smiled. “Next time then, dear,” said Miss Pickford. “Never mind.”

In all her life, it seemed, so far, no one had ever addressed a cruel or unkind word to Nell. Her parents had fought and spat at each other, but never, thank heaven, in her actual presence. This confidence that the world was good was to help Nell survive the years to come.

As Nell and Mr. Blotton approached Heathrow—as Helen wept and begged for help, having arrived at the school gate to collect her daughter and finding her gone—a maintenance supervisor, running behind schedule, neglected to properly check ZOE 05’s tail for metal fatigue, telling himself such a check was pointless anyway, since the aircraft was newly in service. And so he failed to report a crack, quite visible to the naked eye and not merely detectable by his equipment, running under one of the tail fins. He signed the okay chit, and ZOE 05 taxied out of its hangar, into position at Gate number 43, Geneva bound. And Nell, not yet four, followed Erich Blotton into the Departure Lounge.

“Can we sit in the front?” asked Nell, as they boarded the plane. “Daddy always sits in the front.”

“No, we can’t,” Mr. Blotton said crossly, pulling her further and further down the aircraft aisle. Now Erich Blotton had insisted that he and Nell fly first class from Heathrow to Geneva, and had asked for cash to this end. Clifford had counted out the money required, though reluctantly. Erich Blotton then, naturally, and as Clifford had known he would, flew economy and kept the change. And because he smoked—as anyone could tell from his yellow fingertips and dusty cough, and because the check-in girl, not liking him one bit, had purposely put him in nonsmoking—he and Nell left their allotted seats and sat in the very back of the aircraft, where the air is thick and stale and the passengers can feel every vibration, every buffeting the unnatural flying machine endures, and suffer it as well. Erich Blotton, being a man without much imagination, could put up with it better than most, and, like all heavy smokers, would in any case rather die (literally) than do without a cigarette.

Nell was quite frightened, but wouldn’t show it. Nowadays, of course, a small girl in the sole company of a single man, and as seedy a one as this, would attract not just interest, but suspicion. Would warrant a delay at Passport Control, or at the Boarding Gate—a phone call to parents or police. But those were more innocent days. No questions were asked. Nell had her own passport—to obtain which, at that time, required one signature only: the father’s, not the mother’s. (You may ask why Clifford did not simply collect Nell from school himself, rather than leaving the matter to Blotton? The answer is, I’m afraid, Clifford rather enjoyed the drama of the snatch—and besides, he was busy, and accustomed to delegating.) And Nell smiled, as was her custom. Had Nell not done so, but whimpered or cried or held back, some authority might have intervened. But the thing was that Nell disliked Mr. Blotton so very much, with his suit which seemed to have been doused in tobacco, that she was determined to be good and not show it.

“Even if you don’t like people,” Helen had told her, “be good and try not to show it.”

Helen’s only worry about Nell was that she’d grow up like her father, and display her dislikes all too plainly. Arrogant behavior, just about acceptable in the male, sits badly on the female—or so Helen assumed. These events happened, do remember, in the late sixties, and the new feminist doctrine, that what applied to a man applied to a woman too, and vice versa, was only just beginning to penetrate Muswell Hill, where Simon and Helen and little Nell lived. Or where, as from this particular day, just Simon and Helen were to live.

There was a lot of turbulence that day. The aircraft’s tail, as we know, was weakened by metal fatigue; moreover, it had once received a hefty blow, unreported, when taxiing out of the hangar on its maiden flight. During takeoff a whole network of tiny cracks spread from the single savage break overlooked by the maintenance supervisor, and weakened the structure still further. Had the flight over the Channel been calm and placid the aircraft might well have gotten to Geneva safely, and in all probability these faults discovered—they were by now glaringly obvious—and the machine taken out of service. Failing that, of course, the next flight, or the next, of ZOE 05 would have ended in disaster. As it was, as the aircraft approached the French coast, an extra sudden bounce and flick upwards of the tail, followed by a sudden drop of a mere twenty feet, but with a compensating quiver upwards, neatly snapped the roof of the tail section. It hung on for a time, till the floor structure snapped as well. Then the tail section parted company from the rest of the aircraft. These simply silly things do happen; thank God, not often. Meanwhile, the plane dived toward the shoreline below. Sudden decompression caved in the floor of the plane’s body, severing its control system. (Aircraft are no longer built in this way, of course. ZOE 05’s designers had simply lacked imagination; how can the human race learn, especially when it comes to new technology, other than by its mistakes?) The plane broke up as it dived. Seats, complete with strapped-in occupants, hurtled through the air, sent hither and thither by the force of its disintegration. I hope no one suffered too much. I don’t think so. The human mind, presented with such a sudden change of circumstances, goes into instant danger-alert mode, in which no pain is suffered, no fear felt. There was no time, on this occasion, for it to pass into the next, more distressing mode of pain and panic, before death intervened. At least, that’s what they say. I hope they are right, I really do.