The Hearts and Lives of Men (2 page)

Now Clifford Wexford’s rise in the world was not so much meteoric—for surely meteors fall, rather than ascend?—but missilic, having all the force and energy of Polaris rising from the sea. Or let’s put it another way—Clifford Wexford buzzed around his boss, Sir Larry Patt, like a bee determined to get into the honey-pot. The Bosch exhibition had been Clifford’s brainchild. If it succeeded, Clifford would get the credit; if it failed, Leonardo’s and Sir Larry Patt would get the blame and carry the financial loss. That’s the way Clifford worked, then as now. He understood, as men of Sir Larry’s generation did not, the power of PR: that glamour and “the buzz” counted as much, if not more, than intrinsic worth: that money must be spent if money is to be earned—that it doesn’t matter how good a painting or a sculpture may be—if nobody
knows
it’s good, it might as well be bad. Clifford moved Leonardo’s out of the first half of the century into the second and hurled it brutally on its way into the next—he was the key to the success story that was to be Leonardo’s over the next twenty-five years, and Sir Larry realized it, on that opening night of the Bosch Exhibition, though he didn’t much like it.

Angie made her way back to Clifford through the glittery, gossipy crowd as it downed its public-funded champagne cocktails (sugar lump, orange juice, champagne, brandy) beneath the hell-cursed figures of Bosch’s vision, and said, “Her name’s Helen. Some frame-maker’s daughter.”

Angie hoped that would be the end of Helen. Frame-makers were surely the dogsbodies of the art world and hardly worth thinking about. Angie assumed that what would count with Clifford when it came to marriage was not so much a girl’s looks as her parentage and wealth. In this she wronged him. Clifford, like anyone else, wanted true love. He was actually trying quite hard to love Angie, but failing. He could not find her affectations and snobberies entertaining. He thought that being her husband would in too many respects be disagreeable. She would shout at the servants and be childishly bitchy about women he chose to admire, and make tedious scenes about this, that and the other.

“By ‘some frame-maker,’” said Clifford, “I suppose you mean John Lally? The man’s a genius. I commissioned him to hang this whole exhibition.” And poor Angie understood that once again she had betrayed her ignorance, and said the wrong thing. Frame-makers were, after all, to be admired and respected. It was part of Angie’s trouble in her dealings with Clifford that he was not
consistent
—at least in her terms—in what he admired and what he despised. Success, which Angie accorded only to the rich and/or beautiful and/or famous, Clifford would accord to all kinds of unlikely people—quite poor, even disabled poets, elderly writers with whiskery chins and shaky hands or lady artists in dreadful caftans—the kind of people whom Angie would never in a world of Saturday nights ask to dinner.

“But what’s the
point
of them?” she’d ask.

“The future will reckon them,” he’d reply, simply, “if not the present.” How did he
know?
But he seemed to.

If Angie wanted to please Clifford, she had to think first, speak later. He was death to spontaneity. She knew it; yet she wanted him, for ever and ever, for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. That’s love! Poor Angie! She wasn’t nice, but we can pity her, as we can pity any woman in love with a man who doesn’t love her, but is deciding whether or not to marry her, and taking his time about it, and in the meantime making her jump through unkind hoops.

“Well, well,” said Clifford. “So she’s John Lally’s daughter!” and to Angie’s upset and astonishment simply left her side and crossed to where Helen stood.

John Lally didn’t see, which was just as well. He was sulking over by the wine bar, wild-eyed, wild-haired, his eyes deep-set and suspicious, his mouth made loose and over-mobile by rage and protest, and destined within the next twenty years to be the nation’s leading painter, though no one (except Clifford) knew it at the time.

Helen raised her eyes to Clifford’s and found him staring at her. The color of his eyes seemed to intensify whenever he was animated, and what tended to animate him was pulling off some amazing deal—acquiring for Leonardo’s, say, a Tutankhamen mask or a long-lost panel of Elgin Marble. Now they were very blue indeed.

“How blue his eyes are,” Helen thought. “As if they were painted—” and then somehow she just stopped thinking at all. She was frightened. She stood defenseless (or so it would seem) and alone amongst chattering, fashionable people, all rather older than she, who knew exactly what to think, feel and do for the best, as she did not; and perhaps when she looked up into the blue, blue eyes she saw her future and that was what frightened her.

Or perhaps she saw Nell’s future. Love at first sight is a real enough thing. It happens, and between the unlikeliest people. My own view is that Clifford and Helen were bit-part players in Nell’s drama, not center-stage at all, as they of course (like all of us) believed they were. And I do, as I say, believe Nell came into being in that moment when Helen and Clifford just stood and looked at each other and Helen was scared and Clifford determined and both knew their fate. Which was to love and hate each other, until the end of their days. The later joining of flesh to flesh, however overwhelming an experience, was in its way immaterial. Nell came into existence through love: but the passage from the insubstantial into the substantial must needs take place casually in that dark, half conscious, half unconscious passage we know as sex, and all Helen and Clifford knew of this intended miracle, as they looked at each other, was that the sooner they were in bed and in each other’s arms the better. Well, so it is for the luckiest of us.

But of course life is not so simple, even for Clifford, who, being fortunate enough to know very clearly what he wanted, usually got it. There were the gods of
politesse
and convention to placate first.

“I hear you’re John Lally’s daughter,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

“No,” she said. Reader, she did know. Of course she did. She was lying. She had seen Clifford Wexford’s photograph in the newspapers often enough. She had watched him on television—the hope of the British Art World, according to some, or a sorry symptom of its end, as others would have it. More, she had grown up with the sound of her father’s fulminations against Clifford Wexford, his employer and mentor, echoing through her home. (Some thought John Lally’s hatred of Clifford Wexford bordered on the paranoid: others said not, that the emotion, in the circumstances, was perfectly reasonable.) If Helen said “no,” it was because Clifford’s conceit annoyed her, even while his looks entranced her. She said “no” because, reader, I am afraid that lies came easily to her, when they suited her. She said “no” because she was ceasing to be scared and wanted to cause some
frisson
of emotion between him and her—his irritation, her annoyance—and because she was elated by his interest in her, and elation makes one rash. She did not say “no” out of any loyalty to her father—certainly not.

“I’ll tell you all about who I am over dinner,” he said. And so great was the impression Helen made upon him that that was exactly what he did, in spite of the fact that he should have dined at the Savoy that evening and with Sir Larry Patt and Rowena his wife, and other important, influential and international guests.

“Dinner!” she said, apparently astonished. “You and me?”

“Unless you want to bypass dinner,” Clifford said, smiling with such charm and understanding that the implications were all but lost.

“Dinner would be lovely,” said Helen, pretending she had indeed lost them. “Let me just tell my mother.”

“Baby!” reproached Clifford.

“I never upset my mother if I can help it,” said Helen. “Life is upsetting enough for her as it is.”

And so Helen, all innocence—well, almost all innocence—crossed over to her mother Evelyn and addressed her by her Christian name. The Lallys were an artistic and bohemian family.

“Evelyn,” she said. “You’ll never guess. Clifford Wexford’s asked me out to dinner.”

“Don’t go,” said Evelyn, panicky. “Please don’t go! Supposing your father finds out!”

“You’ll just have to lie,” said Helen.

A lot of lying went on in the Lally home at Applecore Cottage in Gloucestershire. It had to. John Lally would fly into terrible tempers over small things, and the small things kept arising. His wife and daughter tried to keep him calm and happy, even if it meant misrepresenting the world and the events thereof.

Evelyn blinked, which she did frequently, as if the world was on the whole too much for her. She was a good-looking woman—how otherwise would she have given birth to Helen?—but the years spent with John Lally had tired and somehow stunned her. Now she blinked because Clifford Wexford was not the fate she had intended for her young daughter, and besides, she knew Clifford was expected to attend a dinner at the Savoy, so what was he doing going out with her daughter? She was all too conscious of the Savoy dinner: John Lally having refused, on three separate occasions, to attend it if Clifford was going too, and had waited till the fourth time of asking to consent to go, leaving his wife no time at all to make the new dress she felt so special an occasion required. Dinner at the Savoy! As it was, she wore the blue ribbed cotton dress she had worn on special occasions over the last twelve years, and had to be content to look washed-out but pretty, and not in the least chic. And how she longed, just for once, to look chic.

Helen took her mother’s blink for approval, as had been her custom since her earliest years. The blink meant nothing of the sort, of course. If anything, it was, like a suicide attempt, a plea for help, to be excused from making a decision which would bring down her husband’s wrath.

“Clifford’s gone to get my coat,” Helen said. “I must go.”

“Clifford Wexford,” said Evelyn, faintly. “Gone to get your coat—”

And so, amazingly, Clifford had. Helen went after him, leaving her mother to face the music of wrath.

Now Angie owned a white mink (what else?)—which earlier in the evening Clifford had gratifyingly admired—and in the cloakroom it hung next to and even touched Helen’s thin brown cloth coat. Clifford went straight to the latter, and drew it out by the scruff of its neck.

“This is yours,” he said to Helen.

“How did you know?”

“Because you’re Cinderella,” he observed. “And this is a rag.”

“I’ll have nothing said against my coat,” said Helen, firmly. “I like the fabric, and I like the texture. I prefer faded colors to bright ones. I wash it by hand in very hot water and I dry it in direct sunlight. It is exactly as I want it.”

It was a speech Helen was accustomed to making. She made it to her mother at least once a week, because at least once a week Evelyn threatened to throw the coat away. Helen’s conviction impressed Clifford. Angie’s mink, stiff on its hanger, made from the skins of wretched dead animals, now seemed to him both gruesome and pretentious. And, looking at Helen, now wrapped rather than dressed, and enchanting—and remember this was in the days before the old, the faded, the shabby and generally messy became fashionable—he simply
consented
, and never again made any critical remark about the clothes Helen chose to wear, or not wear.

For Helen knew what she was doing when it came to clothes and it was indeed Clifford’s talent, great talent, and I am not being sarcastic, to distinguish between the true and the false, the genuine and the fake, the powerful and the pretentious, and have the grace to acknowledge it. Which was why, though still so young, he was Larry Patt’s assistant and would presently fulfill his ambition to be Chairman of Leonardo’s. Telling the good from the bad is what the Art World (and we must call it that name for lack of a better) is all about, and a sizable chunk of the world’s resources is devoted to just this end. Nations which have no religion make do with Art: the imposition of not just order, but beauty and symmetry, upon chaos …

E
NOUGH. CLIFFORD TOOK HELEN
to dine at The Garden, a vaguely oriental restaurant fashionable in the sixties, situated just outside the old Covent Garden. Here apricots were served with lamb, pears with veal, and prunes with beef. Clifford, assuming Helen’s taste would be unformed, and her tongue sweet, thought she’d like it. She did, just a little.

She ate her lamb and apricots with Clifford’s eyes upon her. She had little neat even teeth. He watched her intently.

“How do you like the lamb?” he asked.

His eyes were warm, because he so badly wanted her to give a good answer, and also cold, because he knew that tests must exist, inasmuch as love can so dreadfully destroy judgment, and may prove to be temporary.

“I expect,” said Helen kindly, “it tastes really good in Nepal, or wherever the dish belongs.”

It was an answer, he felt, that could not be bettered. It showed charity, discrimination and knowledge, all at once.

“Clifford,” observed Helen, and she spoke so softly and mildly he had to bend over to hear, and there was a gold chain around her neck, and on it a little locket that rested on the blue whiteness of her skin and entranced him, “this is not an exam. This is you taking me out to dinner, and no one has to impress anyone.”

He felt at a loss, and was not sure he liked it.

“I should be at the Savoy with the bigwigs,” he said, to let her know what he had sacrificed on her account.

“I don’t suppose my father will forgive me for this,” she said, to let him know the same of her. “You are not his favorite person. Though of course he can’t run my life,” she added. She was not, when it came to it, in the least frightened of her father: she got the best of him, as her mother got the worst. His rantings, these days, quite entertained her. Her mother took them seriously, and felt threatened and weakened as her husband fulminated against lying never-had-it-so-good governmental claims, and the folly of a misguided electorate, and the philistinism of the art-buying public, and so forth, and she felt dimly responsible for all of it.

“When you said you didn’t know me, you were lying? Why?” Clifford asked, but Helen only laughed. Her pink-to-white dress glowed in the candlelight: she knew it would. At its worst under the harsh gallery lighting: at its best here. That was why she had worn it. Her nipples showed discreetly in an era when nipples
never
showed. She was not ashamed of her body. Why should she be? It was beautiful.