The Hearts and Lives of Men (22 page)

And Arthur was dismissed. This was the man that Helen loved, who had lain cozily by her side and then, as it were, pushed her out of bed. All the same, he could not wholly dislike Clifford. Like some wounded, flailing animal, he crashed about in the undergrowth to let you know he was coming—he did not pretend to be nice. An un-English trait. Arthur toyed with the idea of spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars on, say, one of Leonardo’s newly-purchased Magrittes, just to take Clifford aback, to regain face, but sensibly controlled himself. The painting would have been bought for the wrong motives. It would not bring pleasure, it would hang year in year out in a Manhattan apartment—the only wall-space he owned and which he scarcely ever visited—no, it was absurd. Let his enormous salary, his ten percent commission on money saved for clients, which ran into millions, mount undisturbed in the bank.

Let me explain something to you, reader. Arthur Hockney was an orphan, and felt it. Now you may think: but he’s a grown man, strong, effective, wealthy, why should this fact affect him so? Sooner or later most of us will be orphans, people without parents. But because of the circumstances of his parents’ death, Arthur felt he had no business to be alive—which was perhaps why his work was so closely connected with death, in all its most dramatic forms, and he had a bad conscience—though I myself don’t think he had cause for one. Harry and Martha Hockney had come North in the twenties, shipped from the South to work in the Chicago stockyards, had become politicized in the union struggles at that terrible time, learned to speak on platforms about class, race and union matters; Arthur, as a child, had lived mostly in a Civil Rights cortège. Until one day, when he was seventeen, his parents’ car had been driven off the road—by accident, it was said, but the Civil Rights people knew better—and his parents killed. Arthur had quarreled with his parents that day and refused to go with them. He had a date with a girl, he said. Now that is a hard kind of thing to recover from, and my own view is he never quite did. The Civil Rights people recognized his trauma, consoled him, treated him with every kindness, paid for his college education. I think they saw in Arthur a future leader, the man who would follow in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s footsteps. But Arthur knew he did not have the religious or political convictions his people needed. He did not join them on their marches, on their platforms, and they did not grudge him his freedom or resent his decision. We did all this, they said, for your parents’ sake. Think no more of it. But Arthur did, of course, how could he not? Now he saw himself as a man without race, country or roots; orphaned in every sense of the word. He traveled the world in an attempt to elude his conscience, and sometimes, as he stared at the mangled bodies of the dead, and rejoiced in his own strength and health and good fortune, thought he had managed. One day, he thought, when I find a political or human movement I can totally agree with, they shall have all my money. In the meantime, let it stay in the bank and earn interest.

Well now, it was apparent to Arthur that Mrs. Blotton had lied, for reasons of her own. Blotton it was who had fallen out of the sky, and lived. Arthur went back to Helen, in London, to inquire about the emerald pendant. Or shall we rather say, reader, that he went back to Helen in London,
and
inquired about the emerald pendant. Perhaps he should not have done so; not raised Helen’s hopes yet again; but gone straight to Cherbourg in search of Nell, because by the time he did so it was too late—but there, that’s love.

He visited her at the Muswell Hill house. She asked him over, her voice warm. Simon was away. He was in Helsinki, attending a Summit Conference. She did not add that Janice Best was covering the same Conference. Why should she? She scarcely found it of interest herself. The weather was warm, summer had suddenly dawned out of a chilly spring. He found her sitting in the garden, on a rug, while baby Edward, a fine, stocky, cheerful child, practiced his new walking technique. She was wearing a kind of cream cotton wraparound dress. Her legs were bare, her pretty feet were in sandals, her brown hair tossed and gleamed in the sun. It was cut short and was very curly. But for all her appearance of ease and good nature, he thought she was strained, and thin, and her “Well, well?” too nervous, too quick.

“What news? Is there any news?”

He asked her about the pendant. An emerald, perhaps? Had Nell had such a thing? If not necessarily an emerald, something recognizably precious?

“Nell didn’t wear jewels,” said Helen, shocked. But something occurred to her and she went upstairs to examine her jewel-box and came down weeping—yes, the pendant was gone. It should have been there in the box. It wasn’t. She had never looked at it since before, before—before the aircrash, she meant, but couldn’t say it. She hated it really. Clifford had wanted it back, but had given it to her with such love—yes, it was perfectly possible for Nell to have taken it, but why should she have? She’d been told not to touch the box, there were treasures inside—she stopped.

“She said, I remember she said, that last morning, could she take a treasure to school for showing—you know what they do—but I was busy—” and Helen wept and wept again, at the failure of mother-love, to get a child to nursery school properly, on the very day you lose her—or indeed, the greater failure of saving her from harm. And perhaps also because now she was frightened; if Nell was indeed alive, what sort of life was it that she had? Anxiety had to take the place of grief, response of nonresponse. And anxiety is just about the most painful emotion a parent can have about a child, enough, sometimes, to make you wish the child had never been born, than do this to you now, make you feel like this.

Helen wept. Arthur thought she would never stop. Grief for the loss of Nell, for her own childhood, for her marriage to Clifford, for Simon, for the humiliation rendered her by Janice Best, for the wretchedness of everything—all was unlocked and released on that afternoon, as Helen wept and little Edward, without his accustomed audience, fell asleep on the lawn, and was nearly, nearly stung by a wasp on his lip—though no one but you and me, reader, will ever know that!

A
ND NELL? WHERE WAS
Nell while her mother wept and her little half-brother slept? I’ll tell you. She was sitting mute and puzzled in the interview room of an assessment center for disturbed children on the edge of Hackney marshes, only some twelve miles away. This is how it came about.

Now you might be excused for thinking with Marthe that the devil was after her, having missed his prey the first time. Marthe and the de Troites had certainly done their best, in the course of the black midnight mass, to bring him up from the depths of hell. Or perhaps it was that Marthe was half-mad with shock, guilt and grief, and hadn’t driven for a long time, and certainly wasn’t used to modern traffic, or how to behave on a Route Nationale—which she now found herself upon.

“Where are we going? What’s happening?” little Nell kept asking from the back of the car. She was still in her nightie. Her head was swimming with shock and fright. It was raining. Headlights blurred in front of Marthe’s rheumy old eyes, her gnarled hands gripped the wheel, and she steered rather than drove, her foot down hard on the accelerator, not that that made much difference to anything. The Deux Chevaux had seen many, many better days. And if the accelerator hardly worked, neither did the brakes, which evened things up. Marthe’s breathing was more like snoring than anything else, but Nell was used to that.

“Please, let’s stop!” begged Nell. “I’m so frightened!” But Marthe kept on, and the tires ate up the miles. And still the flames leaped in Marthe’s memory, and the sound of the howling which had preceded it echoed in her ears and seemed to be pursuing her. It may, of course, have been merely the sound of the blaring warning horns of other drivers, as they zoomed up to and past the erratically driven, badly lit Deux Chevaux. Who is to say a thing like that?

Presently Marthe stopped the car. She did not draw off the road, or wait for a turnout, she simply stopped. It was now raining hard and the old windshield-wipers could not keep proper pace. Marthe could not see, she could not go on. She sat and wept for her old exhausted aching bones, for the terror in her mind, for her fear of hellfire, for the poor child in the back of the car. Nell got out and stood by the side of the road in the rain. (She wore her tin teddy bear on a chain around her neck. She always slept with it, and the Marquise had always tried gently to dissuade her from so doing, and had always failed.) The child felt she had to go for help, for poor weeping Marthe, somewhere, somehow, but she was only just six and scarcely knew what to do. So Nell stood, and her hand went up to the comfort of her teddy bear, as it always did when she was forlorn and bereft.

The first five cars that passed saw the Deux Chevaux in time, through the rain and spray, and swerved and carried on. The sixth car was not so lucky. In it were English holiday-makers, on the road south from Cherbourg. They were all tired; the father, who drove, had been drinking. He thought brandy would keep him alert. It did not. The Deux Chevaux loomed. Too late! Crash, bang, silence! Wreckage strewed across the road. Into the back of this car went, after the disastrous manner of these things, a massive petrol-tanker, traveling far faster than it should. It overturned, it burst; fire leaped across the roadway, engulfing cars coming in the opposite direction. Showers of burning gasoline poured down over the wreckage, cars, bodies, everything. The conflagration was immense; it made headlines all over the world. Ten people died, including Marthe who, though mercifully unconscious at the time, perished as her master and mistress had, by fire. The devil—if you care to look at it like this—having done his intended work, having pursued and caught his victim, and careless of how many others he took out of this world with her, retreated and lay quiet for a time.

And that’s how it happened that little Nell was found wandering, when early morning came, by the side of the road. Shock had rendered her almost speechless. She had a few words of English, and, so far as they could tell, some kind of retrospective amnesia. The wreckage of five cars in all had to be sorted out—three French and two English. How many people had been in which, and why, seventy miles south of Cherbourg on the holiday route, was hard to ascertain. The man from the British Consulate assumed, naturally enough, that the child was from one of the English cars. She called for her mummy, and wept, poor little thing, but was unable to give any information as to her name, or her address, or where she lived. She spoke like a child of three: they thought for a while perhaps she was mentally retarded. Nor did anyone turn up to claim her.

“I fell out of the sky,” she said once, almost proudly, when asked for the umpteenth time where and how she came to be where she was, and that, of course, to her examiners made no sense at all. To you, dear reader, of course it does. She had. But they were right about the retrospective amnesia. Nell, mercifully, had lost all memory of the fire at the château, the accident on the road, Marthe, and Milord and Milady. But now she was amongst English-speaking people and, helped by language, she could go back further in her mind and recall a few details of her earlier life.

“I want to see Tuffin,” she said.

“Tuffin?”

“Tuffin’s my cat.” Well, whatever else, she was certainly British.

So it happened that Nell was shipped home to England by courtesy of the British Consulate and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children combined, and put for a time in an assessment home for children run by the Inner-London Education Authority. She had become one of the waifs and strays thrown up all too often by our chaotic and multitudinous society. Many children go missing and are never found, and a great tragedy that is—worse perhaps than any. A few are found that no one seems to have missed. And what becomes of a child with no parents to protect her, no family to guide her, lost as she is in the world of the poor, the helpless and the oppressed? We will see!

“A
RESPECTABLE MILORD AND
Milady from Cherbourg” were the seven words which led Arthur Hockney to be sitting, on a hot October day, in the offices of the Superintendent of Police of that very town, checking the records for just such a pair. Wealthy, titled, and childless until a couple of years back—or perhaps moved suddenly into the area? But none such could the Superintendent bring to mind.

“It could hardly be the
famille
de Troite!” he said, running his finger down the electoral roll, and he laughed.

“Why not?” asked Arthur. “If they’re rich, if they’re titled, as you say they are—?”

“But they’re older than Methuselah—and hardly the adopting kind,” said the Superintendent.

“Nevertheless—” Arthur was insistent.

“Besides which,” said the Superintendent, “they’re dead.”

“Dead?”

“The château was consumed by fire only a few weeks back. Not to mention Milord and Milady and an elderly servant too. The people around here say the devil did it, sending a lightning bolt from a clear sky. But it’s been a long hot summer as you know. Old people are careless, and these ones drank a lot of good red wine. I am a rational man, Monsieur Hockney, and do not believe that satanic intervention is the most likely explanation for the burning down of an almost derelict château and the death of its elderly occupants!”

Arthur refrained from saying that in his experience when it came to strange events, the most likely explanation was seldom the right one, and made a journey to the site where the château had stood.

He found it a peculiarly gloomy place; it had the odd, sad atmosphere that the scene of a tragedy so often does, but some-thing more as well: a sense of menace, of something nasty left unfinished. He shivered. It was strange. He’d felt this before—in places where terrorist bombs had exploded, or bridges had collapsed, or liners run aground with great loss of life—but it was not usually present at the sites of simple domestic tragedy, on the minor scale. Arthur stayed around a little, poking amongst the dust and ash and rubble, and came across a bright length of yellow ribbon, the kind that would tie a child’s hair.