The Hearts and Lives of Men (20 page)

Milord and Milady sighed and tutted but presently ate the toast, charred on the outside and cold and damp inside, and not at all successful—with quantities of butter and Marthe’s homemade apricot jam, and all without a word of complaint. And that of course is the best kind of present a child can have—to have her efforts commended, even though at some sacrifice to those who do the commending. Nell hugged them all—Milord, Milady and Marthe—and their dark master kept his distance.

Simon spent that Christmas Day with Helen; they tried, for Edward’s sake, to mend matters between them. Simon explained that Helen’s coldness had driven him into Janice’s arms, and Helen had only to say the word and he would never see her again; Helen said, “What word?” and he was too angry to say “love.” So somehow that particular moment for reconciliation passed. Helen wanted to talk about Nell, and how Christmas Day was her birthday, but knew Simon didn’t want Nell’s name mentioned, and that thought upset her. And though they talked pleasantly and lightly enough over the turkey, beneath the decorations, and went out for drinks with friends later, and all agreed the scandal-sheets were simply venomous and not worth suing in case it gave their lies credibility, nothing was healed. The dull ache of unacknowledged grief and resentment remained in Helen’s heart, and the savage pain of discontent in Simon’s. There was no question of divorce. What would that solve? There was Edward to think about. For Helen, it was as if her life was on videotape and someone had pressed “pause” and just stuck her on one particular not very pleasant frame. It was a horrible feeling. Edward grew and she did not. She sent a Christmas card to Arthur Hockney though, of a rather nice Xmas tree, outlined in silver, and got one back, of the Empire State Building in the snow, with King Kong wearing a holly wreath. She couldn’t put it on the mantelpiece in case Simon saw, and knew she was still in touch with him.

No news, she told herself, was good news. But she did realize that Nell would hardly recognize her, so long had it been since they parted. Or since, more accurately, Nell had been wrenched away. Helen prayed every night that God would look after her daughter, wherever she was, though if you asked Helen if she believed in God, she would only have replied cautiously, “I don’t know what you mean by God. If you mean the feeling ‘there is more to this than meets the eye,’ yes, I suppose I do. But that’s as far as I’d go.”

Not far enough, some would say, to satisfy a jealous and demanding God. In whose image Simon was clearly made, for all his gentle manner.

B
UT, READER, THE FACT
is that Nell was simply not destined for a quiet life. It was always to be like this. Fate would allow her some small pleasant respite, then whirl her up and set her down on an altogether different and not necessarily pleasant path. Good fortune and bad were always, for Nell, to follow close upon each other’s heels, and snapping at hers.

When we are small, things
happen
to us; far more than we make happen. We are in no position to control our fate. Events crowd in upon us. And, reader, as it is for us in the beginning, so it is for us in the end, for all our efforts. We will love and be loved or fail in love; live with extremes of fortune, or a steady flow of predictable income: save all our lives or spend all our lives. (Owe 10p when you’re ten, and you’ll be owing £100 at twenty, and £1,000 at thirty. Credit will come easily—so will anxiety.) Live plagued by accidents, disasters, or almost wholly free of them. Some of us lightning seeks out—so we’d better not play golf in a storm; others can stride the course with impunity. If we want to know our fate we need only look back to our childhood, for as we get older events seem to string themselves out; the pattern is too wide, almost too familiar to be seen: except for the feeling, as the elastic in our skirt breaks and it falls to our knees—that’s the bad news—but fortunately where no one can see—that’s the good—that this has happened
before
: how well I know this feeling—oh yes, you are right, it has! You have! It will happen again, what’s more, many a time before you die. Mr. Right will stride over the horizon yet again, albeit from the lounge of the old folks’ home, and turn out to be Mr. Wrong; Mrs. Wrong will burn your toast, and when you’ve exchanged her on that account for Mrs. Right, Mrs. Right will do the same. It is your fate to have burned toast set always before you.

We can learn virtues by practicing them, of course we can. We can acquire the habits of courage, even the most timorous of us, by making the effort required to be brave; of good temper, by not succumbing to our irritation; of saving the face of others, by determinedly losing our own; of patience, by learning to bow the head to fate; of shuffling the cards, and not blaming others, and scraping the toast, and biting back pride, and asking Mrs. Wrong to forgive us, and practicing generosity, not meanness, when it comes to her alimony. But the fate, the underlying pattern of fate, the feeling tone (you could almost call it) of our lives, remains the same. So don’t struggle too much. Accept your fate, make the most of the cards you are dealt. That’s all you can do.

Blame it on the stars, if that’s your fancy. Blame it on Nell’s Mars being in close conjunction with her natal Sun. Or blame it on her previous life, if that suits you as an explanation. She must have done some very good and some very bad things indeed. Blame it on the clash of internal genes—the uneasy mix of Clifford’s and Helen’s blood. Or just look at the situation and say: well, landed up with a pair of nutters like the de Troites, something was bound to happen!

And it certainly did. The story went like this:

The Marquise, in her desperate attempt to win back her youth and loveliness—not just out of vanity, but the better to make a feasible mother for little Nell—concocted a Black Mass involving pentagrams, fire, bat’s blood (far more difficult than lamb’s blood to obtain, as you can imagine) and comfrey root. The Marquis sighed but dressed up as required in black and silver and Marthe groaned “Not again!” and agreed to swing the censor, in which mysterious aromatic herbs burned on glowing charcoal. (The sum of the ages of these three totaled well over two hundred; one cannot, I suppose,
blame
people who explore all possible avenues for regaining their lost youth, though one may certainly accuse them of folly!) The ceremony was to start at the stroke of midnight in the Great Hall of the old château.

Little Nell slept peacefully, and unaware of anything untoward, in her tower room. Outside owls hooted and the wind moaned and black thunderclouds seemed to mass and swirl above the château’s towers, though I imagine, and certainly hope, that this was more due to atmospheric conditions than the actual summoning up of the devil.

It was though, and I must say it, a particularly spooky night. Not even a Spielberg team could do justice to it. The midnight trees tossed their heads about wildly as if longing to uproot and be off, anywhere but here, and the château cats hid under whatever ancient, wormy, cobwebby furniture they could find, and their yellow devil’s eyes were everywhere.

Nell slept! She always did. That is the great benefit of having a kind heart. Her little head would touch the pillow, her blue eyes close, her breath come evenly and sweetly until morning, when she would stir, sigh, and shoot up wide awake, with that excited, looking-forward animation which only the very young and happy know. And why should she not be happy? There was no one to point out how ugly and peculiar—not to mention ancient—her supposed parents were, no one to frown and raise their eyebrows at the dust and dirt. Nell took Milord and Milady and the château as she found them and, being of a kind and cheerful nature, found them very well indeed.

“Had been” happy, I say, for Nell’s stay at the château was to come to an abrupt and terrifying end, that very night.

From the little round room at the top of the West Tower—Nell slept in the East—there flew on stormy nights a kite at the end of a long, supple, metal-bound string. Attached to the end of this contraption was a two-foot-long wax model of the Marquise, lying in a bed of hay. The kite was supposed to draw down lightning—and, with it, life, energy, youth and so forth—into the Marquise. (If it worked no doubt she would have done the same for her husband, and his image in wax would presently have lain there waiting too. She wasn’t mean. She loved her husband. Reader, I don’t like writing about this kind of thing—it makes me feel, as the children say, quite “spooked” myself.) Let us hurry on, but not before mentioning that Benjamin Franklin, the American philosopher and scientist, flew just such a kite, and did indeed succeed in drawing down electricity, with uncomfortable consequences to himself, being at the end of the metal string; well, he didn’t
know
, did he? After that, he did. Some things the human race learns. Just a few.

At half past midnight, when the invocations and chantings and prostrations down below were well underway, lightning streaked down the wire, melted the model of the Marquise right away, and started a fire in the hay. No one noticed. Of course not. Neither the Marquise, the Marquis, or Marthe. They were too absorbed in that fire of youth and passion which the devil was supposed to be creating within those fragile, feeble rib cages—or actually was! I begin to think perhaps the devil
did
brush very near that night, fanned his hideous leathery wings as close as can be to Nell’s sleeping cheek. The fire in the West Tower ran like a host of little burning insects which, once they’d eaten the hay, swarmed over the floorboards and down the cracks into the room below, where they ate what they could, grew bigger and stronger, and wanted more! Whoosh! How dry and tindery the château was!

And in another country, a hundred miles away, Nell’s mother, Helen, stirred and moaned in her sleep; and Nell’s father in another bed, woke, and stretched out his hand for comfort to his partner Elise—he who seldom seemed to need comfort, or reassurance, or help of any kind. I tell you, it was a strange night.

Nell slept in the East Tower. The fire started in the West Tower, crept downward, fanned by the high winds (and the devil’s wings, if you asked the local populace, and who’s to say they were wrong! If you invoke the devil, something nasty turns up, of that you can be sure, and will do you no good, no matter how strong and wise and able to control you think you are!) and entered the Great Hall, in mid-Black Mass, as a rushing wall of flame. The Marquise, nutty to the last, stepped not away from it but toward it, thinking the pouring waves of flame were some kind of magic fountain of youth: that she would walk through it and emerge immortal and possessed by an unearthly beauty which would bind all men to her forever, and so forth: and not only that, she’d be able to take Nell down to the village school without remark. She did not, of course, emerge from the flames at all, but was utterly consumed. The Marquis, who loved his wife as she was and did not care one whit about her failure to be eternally young and beautiful, ran after her to drag her back from her insane purpose, but tripped over his wizard gowns and fell: and the little fiery, diabolical insects ran in their hordes over the voluminous folds of dusty fabric and he too died. I do not think either suffered much. I think the strength of their emotions saved them from much physical pain; or even fear of death. She was so convinced of resurrection; he so intent on saving her! They were not, as I say, wicked people; they did not wish to go quietly into the evening of their old age, that was all—and they had their wish, and it consumed them.

Marthe, however, the third party to their diabolic escapade, their disastrous Black Mass, took to her heels at the sight of the fire; she was out the door in a flash. She was a heavy woman in her early eighties, but could move fast enough in an emergency. And this certainly was an emergency like no other. The wooden floor of the circular staircase which led up to Nell’s room was smouldering as Marthe pounded up it to rescue the child: from every part of the château roof great flames leaped as if to touch the sky, and the wind roared and howled around.

Nell woke to find herself roughly bundled up and over Marthe’s shoulder and down the stairs: bounce, bounce, and wherever she looked there was fire, and Marthe’s poor bare feet (the Marquise—God rest her soul—insisted on no shoes when invoking the devil) trod amongst cinders, and as she ran she shrieked “
Le diable! Le diable!
” thus frightening poor Nell more than anything else. No one wants to think the devil is at their heels! Marthe, of course, believed exactly that. It was hardly surprising that she did. She was guilty. Her master and mistress had been punished, killed. She would be next!

Marthe made for the little Deux Chevaux parked in the courtyard and, although—for various reasons which I shan’t delay us by going into now—it was at least forty years since she had actually driven a car, she pushed Nell into the back, jumped into the driver’s seat, and with a grinding of gears that in other circumstances would have been a source of conversation for days, days, set off out of the inferno. She made for the main road, away from the village, not toward it. She was not looking for rescue; she was trying to put as great a distance as possible between the burning château and herself. But you can’t, of course, escape the devil that easily!

Now you remember, reader, that while Nell was living at the château the de Troites had kept her existence secret; she was theirs illegally, a black-market child, and while other secretive adoptive parents can announce themselves boldly as aunts and uncles, or grandparents, or go away for a couple of years and return with an apparently natural child, the de Troites had done nothing so sensible. A few of the villagers had caught a glimpse of a child, but kept it to themselves. So enchanting a small girl, with her delicate fairy limbs and wide haunting eyes, might well be some kind of phantom, and gone before you realized she was there! A pity to drive such a creature away. Besides, you know how rural people are—they keep themselves to themselves, and believe that least said is soonest mended!

The charred bodies of the de Troites were found in the debris of the château. Marthe had vanished without trace, but her bedroom, it was known, had been in the West Tower (where the fire had started) and that had collapsed in upon itself. No one doubted but that her poor old bones were somewhere there; but she had no surviving family and few friends and no one looked. A mention of her, the faithful
serviteuse
, was made on the de Troite “here lies” headstone, and decency thus served. And as for little Nell—no one looked for her remains because no one was certain she had ever been there. She had vanished from the region forever.