The Hearts and Lives of Men (16 page)

Clifford kept a Lally painting of a dead duck and a mad-eyed hunter above his bed. It reminded him, he told inquirers, of the time his ex-father-in-law had burst in upon him and Helen and discovered them in bed together. Well, many a traumatic occasion later becomes an after-dinner tale. It is a form of therapy in which the talkative often indulge, and I do not exempt myself. Clifford still spoke bitterly about the divorce, although everyone (who was anyone) knew it had been he who instituted proceedings, and that he had not been deflected one whit by Helen’s tears and obvious repentance. None so irrational as a man betrayed: the more so if he’s accustomed to betraying! Now, beneath the dead duck, Clifford said to Fanny:

“I love you as much as I love anyone, which isn’t much. If I had to choose between a Francis Bacon and you I daresay I’d choose the Bacon! But I need someone to run the house for Nell, so I’m asking you. I’m sure we’ll get on.”

“Nell should stay where she is,” said Fanny, briskly, “at home with her mother.” She was not afraid of Clifford, and never took too much notice of the unkind things he said: well, she couldn’t and still have stayed. “A child of three needs a mother, not a father.”

“Her mother is feckless, idle, an alcoholic and a slut,” said Clifford. You could tell he didn’t like Helen, but also that he still loved her. Fanny sighed. It was always the subtext of Clifford’s words which upset her, not the words themselves.

“A mother is a mother,” she said, getting out of bed and starting to dress. She had lovely long slim legs, slimmer and longer than Helen’s. If Helen had a bad point, it was her legs, which were distinctly stocky now she was moving into her late twenties. She often wore trousers. Fanny, in those liberated days when women wore anything that took their fancy, only the sillier, the silkier, and the frondier the better, could wear miniskirts and hot-pants to advantage. It was when she turned up at the office in these latter and Clifford remonstrated, saying the good burghers of the canton would not approve, that their affair began. Clifford did not make a habit of sleeping with his secretaries: on the contrary. It was just that she was there, he was in a foreign country, and she had a Master’s Degree in Art History and her judgment on paintings was sound, and he could at least have a decent conversation with her, which was more than he could say for the heiresses of the Geneva jet set. She did not, of course, have Clifford’s flair for combining art and business, but then who could?

“You’ve gone doo-lally-tap, Clifford,” said Fanny. “Stealing a child is a very wicked thing to do.”

“How can you steal something that is yours to begin with?” he demanded. “In the same spirit that I would rescue a rotting Leonardo from a damp church, and not stop to ask permission, I’m rescuing this child from its mother. All you mean is, Fanny, you’re jealous and possessive and don’t want to share me with Nell!”

Clifford believed, as does many a man, that he was central to the lives of all the women around him, and that those women, although capable of emotional judgment, were not of moral judgment. And I am sorry to say that Fanny, as if bearing him out, gave in, laughed lightly and said, “I expect you’re right, Clifford.” For Fanny was well aware that her living with Clifford was conditional on Nell’s presence in the house. And how much better to live at Numéro Douze Avenue des Pins, with its spectacular view and its stretches of parquet flooring and its heated swimming pool reflecting the icy Alps above, and its servants, than in the small apartment above a delicatessen in downtown Geneva, which was all her salary at Leonardo’s enabled her to afford. For although Leonardo’s paid its chairman, and its directors, and its investors splendidly, it seemed to think that its ordinary employees—that is to say, the women—should balance the privilege of working at Leonardo’s against low wages and be grateful. (But that’s the way it is for women out there in the world, especially if they are working in publishing or the arts, or for the public good, teaching or nursing—as I am sure many of you know to your cost.) And Fanny knew well enough that there were many just as beautiful, just as talented girls as she, all too eager to take her job as personal assistant to the great, the famous, the glamorous whiz kid Clifford Wexford, and to do it for even less than she. And that once you are emotionally involved with your boss, you had better do as he asks, because he will no longer behave rationally about the typing, the filing, and so on and may confuse your work with
you
, and you’ll be out on your ear.

Fanny, I’m afraid, failed. A for Expediency, C for Integrity. Not a passing mark. No. Fanny agreed to move in with Clifford and forthwith ceased to discourage his plan to send off the dreadful Erich Blotton to kidnap Nell. In her defense I can only say that though she did not admire Clifford’s personality, or respect his social and financial dealings with the world, admiration and respect are not required when it comes to love. Fanny loved Clifford and that was that. Clifford, by the way, was a wonderful lover. Affectionate, forceful, not given to doubt. Have I mentioned that to you before? And so good-looking, of course. Anger with Helen had lately given his fair, stern face a kind of cavernous, hungry quality. I tell you, he was terrific in those days, not to mention photogenic. Of course the gossip columnists loved him.

But Fanny did at least insist that Clifford himself should meet Nell at the airport. And Clifford, having absorbed the dreadful word “Overdue,” went to have a glass of wine (he seldom drank spirits) in the Executive Lounge (he had useful friends in airports just as he had them everywhere). So he watched the Arrivals Board from a comfortable armchair, but it did not make him more comfortable in his mind. No. If the truth were known, he could scarcely breathe from anxiety, but he did not let it show on his face. Presently “Overdue” changed to “Kindly Contact ZARA Desk.” The words took up three lines on the display board and put all the other listings out of kilter. The word “kindly” was of course surplus, and for that reason the more ominous.

Clifford looked at the crowd milling around the ZARA Airlines Desk and knew that the worst had occurred. He did not join the crowd. He went back into the Executive Lounge and phoned Fanny. Fanny came at once.

It was left to Fanny, later, to call Helen, and tell her what had happened.

N
OW HELEN, AS YOU
may imagine, was in considerable distress already. She had arrived at Miss Pickford’s nursery school at 3:15 to find Nell gone.

“Her father’s chauffeur came to collect her,” said Miss Pickford, “in a Rolls Royce,” as if this latter fact excused and explained everything.

In those more innocent days—we are talking about the late Sixties—child molestation and abuse was a rarer thing than it is today, or at least we were not stunned by example after dreadful example on our TV screens and newspapers, and it did not occur to Helen that what we now know as a “stranger” had taken Nell. She knew at once that this terrible deed was Clifford’s doing, that Nell was at least physically safe. She called Simon at the
Sunday Times
, and her lawyer, and reproached Miss Pickford heartily, and only then settled down to weep.

“How can he do it?” she asked friends, her mother, acquaintances, everyone on the phone, that late afternoon. “How can he be so wicked? Poor little Nell! Well, she will grow up to hate him, that is the only comforting thing about this whole horrible affair. I want Nell back at once and I want Clifford put in prison!”

Simon, who had come home at once to look after his distressed wife, said calmly that it would do no good to have Nell’s father in prison. Nell certainly wouldn’t want that. And Cuthbert Way, the lawyer, came over at once, abandoning his other cases—Helen was stunningly beautiful in this the fourth month of her pregnancy—and said that, since he imagined Clifford had taken Nell to Switzerland, it was going to be difficult to get Nell back at all, let alone Clifford put in prison. That put the cat among the pigeons.

Switzerland! It was the first Helen had heard of Clifford and Switzerland. She didn’t read the gossip columns; she had been too busy putting together the pretty, comfortable house in Muswell Hill and settling Nell in at the nursery, and arguing about access with Clifford’s solicitors, and wondering whether or not she was pregnant and buying what in those days was called “junk” and in these days is called Victoriana or even “later antiques”; and one way and another, she told herself and everyone that evening, she’d had no time to look in the gossip columns and discover what everyone else apparently knew—that Clifford Wexford had been put in charge of Leonardo’s Geneva, and had a new modern house built at vast expense on the lakeside, no doubt complete with nursery.

The reason Helen didn’t read the gossip columns was not the ones she gave. It was, as we know, that it still hurt her to read about Clifford’s latest
inammorata.
She wasn’t exactly jealous—here she was, after all, happily married to Simon—she just couldn’t bear it. It hurt. Simon knew, of course, that Helen still loved Clifford, just as Fanny knew that Clifford still loved Helen, but obviously neither pressed the point. What good would it do but harm to themselves?

Cuthbert Way, the lawyer, said he would of course proceed through the international courts, but it would take time. Helen stopped weeping and protesting her outrage. She became deathly white; she could hardly speak. Shock and outrage were giving way now to piercing maternal anxiety. She knew that something terrible, terrible was happening. (And it was, oddly enough, at just about this time that turbulence hit ZOE 05 and the cracks in her frame widened and deepened and turned into those death-dealing splits.) But of course the misery and anxiety caused, quite reasonably, by Nell’s abduction served to mask the other, more instinctive, maternal awareness.

Then came the phone call from Fanny. It reanimated Helen as nothing else seemed able to do.

“Who? Fanny who?” (A hand over the phone) “Clifford’s latest, everyone! He’s reduced to his secretaries now. How dare she call! What a bitch!”

And then the news. I shan’t dwell on this part. It is too terrible. We know that Nell is still alive. Helen does not. I can’t bear to be with her at this moment. But I believe that hereafter Helen went more calmly and kindly through life, and was less given to vituperation. Except of course where Clifford himself, the cause of her grief, was concerned.

T
HE DEATH OF A
child is not something to be joked about, or laughed at. It is an event from which a parent does not recover; life is never quite the same again, nor should be, for now it incorporates an unnatural event. We do not expect to outlive our children, nor do we want to. On the other hand, life must go on, if only for the sake of those who are left, and, what is more, it is our duty to learn to enjoy it again. For what do we regret for those untimely dead, but the opportunity to live with enjoyment? If we are to give proper meaning and honor to their death, and our grief, we must enjoy the life we, and not they, are privileged to have, and live thereafter properly and well, without wranglings or rancor.

Alas, of all the people in the world, Clifford and Helen were perhaps the least likely to live their lives properly and well. And though in truth Nell, as we know, was not in fact dead but sleeping soundly in a soft, safe though lumpy, bed not a hundred miles away at the time when Clifford and Helen both arrived at the scene of the aircrash, we could still have wished the apparent tragedy to have united them in mutual grief, not driven them further apart in bitterness and hate.

“I’m sorry,” Clifford could have said. “If I hadn’t behaved the way I did it would never have happened. Nell would still be alive.”

“If only I hadn’t been unfaithful,” Helen could have said, “we would still be together now, and Nell still with us.” But no. They faced each other on those sad sands, she flown in on a mercy flight from London, he chauffeur-driven from Paris, and argued. Both were far too gone in grief to weep; but not, it seems, to quarrel. In the background, rescue teams worked with cranes, diving equipment, tractors, with the useless ambulances standing by. And as the tide retreated inch by inch, it lay bare inch by inch the grisly relics of the crash.

“Not a single survivor,” Clifford said to Helen. “If you’d been reasonable she could have come out by boat and train, she would never have been on the plane. I hope you go to hell. I hope you live in hell from now on, knowing that.”

“You were stealing her,” Helen said, quite calmly. “That is why Nell is dead. And as for hell, you came to me out of it, and dragged me down into it, and now you have destroyed Nell.”

She didn’t scream or hit; perhaps being pregnant anaesthetized her feelings, just a little. I hope so. Later, Helen was to say that short stretch of time when she believed Nell was dead was the most miserable and despairing of all her days but, even so, she knew that, for the unborn baby’s sake, she could not let herself receive the full force of the disaster. She did not see how, otherwise, she could have stayed alive. Grief would, quite simply, have killed her.

“Go back to your mistresses and your money,” she said. “It’s nothing to you that Nell’s dead. Crocodile tears!”

“Go back to your whoring and your dwarf hack journalist,” he said. “I pity the baby! I expect you will murder this one too.” By “dwarf hack journalist” he meant, of course, Simon, who, though one of the most distinguished political columnists of his day, was certainly not a tall man. Helen, at five-foot-seven, was the same height as her new husband.

And so they parted, Clifford back to his chauffeured Rolls Royce; Helen to sit by herself on the desolate beach and mourn. Clifford had refused to go into the identification hut.

“I am not interested in her remnants,” he said. “Nell is dead and that’s that.”

He did not know why he had come, except that action was better than inaction, in the first stunned days of grief.

Simon had said to Helen, “You are not to go in. Let me,” and, while she had sat outside, searched amongst the scraps for traces of the missing child. The authorities like bodies to be assembled, named, accounted for, and disposed of with true religious formality. We must all, past and present, be recorded, logged and numbered, and our story told, lest the wild proliferation of humanity reduce us to despair. And besides, there is the question of insurance.