The Hearts and Lives of Men (21 page)

I
T WAS AT ABOUT
this time, some two years and a few months after ZOE 05 cracked and crashed, when all the insurance money and required compensation had finally been paid out, including an extra two million pounds to Mrs. Blotton, over and above the normal payment of forty thousand pounds for her husband’s loss (negligence on the airline’s part having been proved), a strange thing happened. ZARA Airlines had a phone call from a lady who kept a fashion house in Paris. She said there was something she felt in duty bound to report. She had been so busy setting up a new business, it had taken her until now to get in touch. Anyway, it was probably nothing. Arthur Hockney, summoned, flew in from New York at once to interview this Madame Ravisseur, and found her to be a most charming and elegant lady in her middle years, if laggardly in this way and that. He stood for a good five minutes at her front door until she got around to answering it. Well, it was in character. Madame Ravisseur, for her part, faced by so distinguished and handsome a black American, was glad of this prompt attention from ZARA Airlines, and spoke freely and volubly in the English she had recently learned. She had, she said, left the seaside town of Lauzerk-sur-Manche forever on the very day that ZOE 05 crashed. She had, after many years, finally gathered her courage together to sell her little
charcuterie
, leave her husband and, rather late in life, set out into the world to make her fortune. Better late than never. It was her motto. She had boarded the Paris bus perhaps an hour and a half after the aircraft came down—they had in fact been delayed along the road by the onrush of emergency vehicles. A very strange pair boarded the bus at the first stop, she said—an ugly, bad-tempered man who smoked too much, and a charming little girl, with curly blonde hair, wide eyes, and rosebud mouth. Now Madame Ravisseur knew her quiet, tiny village very well, and these strangers seemed simply to have dropped from the sky. Where had they come from? The little girl had become distressed on the journey, wanting to
faire pipi
; she, Madame Ravisseur, had stopped the bus and helped the child, and found her shoes sopping wet and chafing, “
la pauvre petite
,” and her socks sandy. The man’s trousers, she had then noticed, were wet, and clinging below the knee, as if he had been wading in the sea. Madame had not been able to get out of her head the idea that the man and the child had indeed dropped from the sky, that they were something to do with the aircrash, though what and why she couldn’t tell.

“You describe him as a smoker,” said Arthur. “Are you sure?”

“Two packets of Gauloises nonstop, and looking around for more! Oh yes, he was a smoker. I did not think he was the father of the little girl—she coughed too much when he came near. His own child would have been accustomed to it. And when he got off the bus—that was in the Rue Victor Hugo, he went straight into a
tabac.
I watched.”

“You should have been a detective,” observed Arthur Hockney. He liked her strong Gallic looks, the slow surety of her movements. She made him coffee and it took her half an hour to get it together, but when it came it was excellent.

“You’ve taken some considerable time to come forward with this information,” he did remark.

“Time passes so quickly when you’re busy,” she said, vaguely enough. And indeed, she seemed to have some interior clock which moved at an altogether different pace from that of other people.

He spent a slow, languorous, intensely pleasurable night with Madame Ravisseur, I’m sorry to say. But then, as Simon found, Helen had eyes only for her baby, and unrequited love is long and painful and needs relief; and yes, Arthur Hockney was indeed in love with Helen. Her Christmas card, crossing with his, had made his breath catch and bring him to this realization. In love with a vague, pale, unhappy Englishwoman! It hardly made sense, but there it was. He meant to do nothing about it. Regard it like an illness, or the pain in a broken leg, which presently would pass. Put up with it, and wait till it was gone, withered away for lack of attention. But somehow, in the meantime, it made him more responsive to other women, more readily impressed; more, he feared, alive.

The
tabac
in the Rue Victor Hugo pointed Arthur Hockney’s way to a particular cafe: here money changed hands and what amounted to a guided tour of certain brothels in the Algerian quarter, from which, or so his contacts told him, many deals in human lives were made. It served as an international clearinghouse for the selling of men, women and children into domestic or sexual slavery, and for the new, growing, less dangerous but highly profitable black market in children for adoption. Kidnapped or legitimately orphaned (their phrase) children were smuggled out of the Third World and sold from dealer to dealer, fetching higher prices as they went, until finally reaching the punter. The two markets—for slaves and for children—are kept apart, but sometimes overlap. This, of course, had always been Arthur’s fear for little Nell. He was the more relieved when, this time, the trail led him to Maria, the only employee of this house of illest fame to have survived the many staff turnovers (not to mention deaths) since ZOE 05 crashed.

Maria sat and sighed and curled her long dark hair around her finger. She had a childish air, he thought.

“I am a very respectable woman,” she said. “I am only doing this for a little, until I can find a proper job.”

“Of course,” he said.

“And I am doing a kindness to my clients,” she said, “and saving their wives from much distress.”

“I know,” he said gently.

“So long as you understand. I have too kind a heart, that is my trouble. When the little English girl came I took good care of her. I made sure she saw nothing she should not see.”

“I thank you, on her parents’ behalf.”

“Oh, she had parents? Usually the parents are dead. What is to become of these children if no one looks after them?”

“What indeed?”

“The little English girl was fortunate. Sometimes the life is not so nice, especially for a child. She went to new parents in Cherbourg.”

“Cherbourg? You are sure?”

“No. The name just came into my head. I have always liked Cherbourg. I went there when I was a child, with my mama.”

“Please try and remember. It’s important.”

“Cherbourg. I am convinced of it.”

“The name of her parents?”

“How could I remember a thing like that? You must understand I live a very eventful life. I see so many people.”

“Please try.”

“I remember thinking, yes, she was very lucky. I know. She went to a Milord and a Milady. If only that had been my fortune! I too was adopted. Everyone laughed.”

“Why did they laugh?”

“Perhaps the Milord and the Milady were funny. I am becoming very tired. Perhaps we should go to my room?”

“Not yet.”

No, there had been nothing special about the man who brought the child in. No, she couldn’t remember if he smoked. Well, it was a long time ago. Many men had passed through her bed since, how could she remember this one? But she remembered the child. She remembered her good turn, in particular. Odd, things had turned out well for her since.

“What good turn was that?” Arthur asked. He had had to buy time with the girl. She had a broad face and strong arms, a lot of body hair and a strong, not unpleasant, smell. She busied herself with tweezers, plucking hair from her legs. She was the sort of woman who liked to make good use of her time. She should have had six children and lived in a farmhouse, Arthur thought. (But that’s the kind of thing men do wish for women, without considering just how hard and boring the domestic life can be.)

The little girl had had a jewel on a chain in her possession, Maria said. It was obvious she came from a good home; you could tell, the way you could with kittens; she had been loved and cherished; she was not the scum of the earth which usually turned up, already gray-faced and squinty-eyed from hard times and bad luck. It had made her cry, just to think of it:
la pauvre petite!
So instead of simply purloining the emerald as anyone sensible would have done, she made it safe and handed it back and told her to look after it. Whoever knew, perhaps it would lead the child back one day to her true family? Truth was stranger than fiction.

“Made it safe? In what way?”

Maria told Arthur about the cheap tin teddy bear with the head which unscrewed, in which she’d put the pendant.

“I’ve heard about those,” said Arthur. “But so have all the customs officers in the world. In what way did things turn out well afterwards?”

She’d finished the left leg. She stretched it and admired its smoothness, and moved on to the right. They were good, strong legs. She said her pimp had been murdered the next day, and she was glad; he’d been a violent, nasty man. Now she was with another, who really cared for her. (She sounded, he thought, like an actress talking about her agent.) If Arthur wanted more than talk, she was perfectly willing. He wouldn’t have to pay extra. Just talk always felt like cheating to her but it was surprising how many men wanted to do it. Arthur declined the offer, with thanks. He paid her an extra hundred francs, so that her good deed would at least be rewarded in this life. He was not sure how she would fare in the next.

A
RTHUR NEXT WENT TO
Geneva and made an appointment to see Clifford. He did not think the interview would be easy. Nor was it. Leonardo’s Geneva office overlooked the lake. It had one of the more spectacular views Europe offered, and also one of the highest rents. Clifford, at this busy time, did not like to waste his time on anyone but millionaires; a black insurance-fraud investigator could bring him no profit, only bad memories. ZARA Airlines had recently paid out £40,000 on Nell’s life, which had been split between himself and Helen. Helen had given her share of the money to a charity: more fool her. He told himself it was because she felt guilty. If she had not argued so about the access arrangements, he would not have had to fly the child out in secret and she’d be alive today. Helen’s fault! Like the divorce, like his unhappiness, like everything! With Helen so much to blame, these days he got on very well with his mother. There had been a time when all his dissatisfactions had been laid at the maternal door, but these were forgotten now, and he was a frequent weekend visitor at Dannemore Court, his parents’ place in Sussex. Leonardo’s paid for his frequent flights. The check-in girl at Swissair could be relied upon to provide him with the best possible seat. He had had a short affair with one of the senior girls—painful for her, since she fell in love—but sufficiently well-managed by Clifford that she continued to hope, rather than lapse into hate. It is not a good thing to be hated by the check-in girl of an airline on which you frequently travel. They have friends everywhere.

“It’s lovely to have you here, darling,” said Cynthia. “But isn’t it terribly expensive? All this to-ing and fro-ing.”

“Leonardo’s pays,” said Clifford.

“Do they know it pays?” asked Otto.

“It gets swallowed up,” said Clifford. Otto sighed. It seemed to him, since Nell’s death, that everything good had gotten swallowed up, in a sea of greed, opportunism and self-interest. The superpowers aimed their hideous weapons at one another and beneath this arch of evil the human race gamboled and played. True, the Nazis no longer stalked the capitals of Europe, but the men he had worked for turned out to be traitors, or worse. Now Nell was gone, and with her the future he had once, by sacrifice, hoped to redeem.

“Father seems low,” said Clifford to Cynthia.

“He is,” said Cynthia. “It’s very tiring.” She had written a kind letter to Helen, almost a letter of apology, at the time of the ZOE 05 disaster, and had received one back, short but courteous, acknowledging Cynthia’s loss along with her own. Had not Nell stayed for some months at Dannemore Court, in the nursery which had once been Clifford’s? Did she not too, the paternal grandmother, feel the loss? Should it not be “the death”? Helen had not referred to Nell’s death, only to her loss. It had struck Cynthia as a little strange, but she had not mentioned it to Clifford, for fear of seeing his brow darken and his eyes dull, and he too descend once again into depression. Depression, of course, as Cynthia knew, is anger unrecognized and undeclared. Clifford railed against Helen when he should better have railed against Cynthia; Otto railed against Clifford (in private), but both father and son were angry with fate; with the world. Nell’s death had triggered a sullen melancholy, which the son was better able to throw off than the father. Cynthia diverted herself with an animating affair with an opera singer from, of all places, Cairo, and waited for things to get better. Things did, in her experience.

But that’s by the by. In the meantime Clifford had no wish to be reminded of Nell. ZARA Airlines had paid up, so why was Arthur Hockney persecuting him?

Arthur knew better than to suggest to Clifford that he had reason to believe his daughter was alive. He said merely it had come to ZARA Airlines’ attention that perhaps Mr. Blotton, who had accompanied the child, had not been on the aircraft at the time of the crash, but had sent a delegate in his place.

“Unlikely,” said Clifford, “since I was going to pay him his second half of the fee when he handed the child over. I would hardly have paid it to anyone but him, now would I? These are stupid questions, Mr. Hockney, on a painful theme, and you have no business raising them.”

“Did Mr. Blotton smoke?” Arthur asked. Clifford seemed taken aback.

“How can I remember a detail like that, Mr. Hockney? I’m a busy man. You may very well be able to give me a blow-by-blow account of the events of a day more than two years ago—but I certainly can’t. Memories of the past are for those who have no experience in the present. In other words, for those who live dull lives. Good day, Mr. Hockney.”

“Did he smoke?” persisted Arthur. “It’s important.”

“Important to you, perhaps. Not to me. But yes, Blotton smoked. He smelled like an old ashtray. I imagine his death on ZOE 05 saved him from a lingering death by lung cancer.”