The Hearts and Lives of Men (24 page)

Clifford then went home to his little house in Orme Square—an excellent investment, and worth every penny of the live-in couple who had housekept through the years of his absence in Geneva and kept the damp and the robbers out—and wondered what to do with his evening. He would like to take some charming and beautiful woman out to dinner, and impress her with his own charms and beauty, and possibily get to know her better during the course of the night, so that when he met Angie at nine-thirty next morning he would feel even more take-it-or-leave-it than he did already. He knew this was the best stance from which to deal with women, both in emotional or business matters—and the more genuine the feeling the better. They saw through pretense.

Clifford went through his address book, but nothing seemed to satisfy, no one seemed right. Helen’s number was in his diary. Every year he copied it out again. He kept up, in the scandal sheets, with the latest details on Simon Cornbrook’s affair with hackette Janice Best. He’d told himself that Helen deserved no better. Let her put up with public humiliation—he’d had to, through the divorce. Helen, who through her intransigence had brought about the death of his only child, Nell. Poor little Nell, with her blue eyes full of trust and bright intelligence. Though he could see now that he himself, if only partly, had been in some way responsible. He did not wish to be in the same moral boat as Sir Larry Patt. Helen had loved Nell and not merely wished to own her, to spite him. He could no longer deny it.

He picked up the phone. He dialed. Helen answered, her voice soft and unchanged.

“Hello?”

“It’s Clifford. I just wondered if you were free tonight for dinner?”

There was a pause. In that pause Helen turned and consulted Arthur Hockney, but Clifford wasn’t to know that.

“I’d love to,” said Helen.

“R
EADER, YOU KNOW HOW
in real life coincidence happens again and again. Your sister and your son’s wife have the same birthday; on the day you meet a long-lost friend, by accident in the street, a letter from that same friend arrives; your boss’s wife was born in the house you now live in—that kind of thing! It’s against commonly accepted rules for writers to use coincidence in fiction, but I hope you will bear with me, and allow that at the very moment Clifford calls to ask her out to dinner, Helen may very well just happen to be in conversation with Arthur Hockney, whom she so rarely sees, because it’s just the kind of thing that would happen, does happen. This story of mine follows real life pretty closely—which is why it may at times seem farfetched. Ask yourself, isn’t truth even more unbelievable than fiction? Don’t the headlines which greet you every day, in your daily newspaper, speak of the most extraordinary and unlikely events? Don’t events cluster in your own life? Doesn’t simply nothing happen for ages—and then everything happen all at once, excitingly or terribly, as the case may be? Well, it certainly does in mine, and writers can be no different from readers.

Well, anyway! What an evening for everyone! Picture the scene in Helen’s household. It’s seven in the evening. Helen has put two-year-old Edward to bed and now finally has time to give Arthur all her attention. He is passing through London. He called Helen from Heathrow; she insisted he come over. Simon is away covering a political convention in Tokyo, and Janice Best is away in Tokyo too. Helen is wearing a cream silk dress, very simple; she settles into a pale green armchair and looks so lovely and so vulnerable that Arthur Hockney all of a sudden feels like one of the criminals it is his life’s work to pursue, and understands the temptation to sever someone’s brake cables, or poison their drink—that someone being Simon Cornbrook. Anyone, that is, who makes Helen unhappy. What Arthur doesn’t understand is that Helen could have Simon back with a snap of her pretty fingers—if Simon goes about with Janice it’s in the attempt to regain Helen’s loving attention—but she won’t, she can’t, snap her fingers! Not till Nell is found, until the ghost of the marriage to Clifford is settled. She won’t give up. Arthur, for all his intuition, for all his easy way with women, and his kind and cheerful experience of them, is a simple, even innocent man when it comes to matters of the heart, if not of conscience. He sits black and glossy and rather too broad and muscular for the pale green chair he’s in (Simon is finely-boned—all heavyweight intellect but lightweight of body—and the whole house reflects it, including the furniture) and listens while Helen says, “I know I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t even say it, but I still feel Nell is alive. Every Christmas I say to myself, today Nell is four, five, six. I never say ‘would have been,’ I say ‘today she is.’ Why is that?”

(The Eastlake Assessment Center in Hackney, by the way, has assigned Nell a birthday. They are six months off in their judgment. Nell is tall for her age, and they have accorded her a birthday on June 1st. They believe she is six years and nine months old. We know her, on this spring evening, to be six years and three months old. A whole half-year wrong. I am sorry to say that all the Center’s assessments are pretty much off. They have decided that our Nell, our bright, pretty, lively Nell is E.S.N.—educationally subnormal—but that is not our concern at the moment.)

“Well,” says Arthur, imprudently, “I too suspect she isn’t dead, but suspicions are not evidence. The important thing for you is to begin to live your life here and now, not as if someday in the future, somehow, when Nell returned, it was going to begin.” But Helen just swirls the drink in her hand, and smiles, too politely.

“At least accept that she is lost,” he says, “and lost forever, even though she may be alive.”

“No!” says Helen, rather in the tone in which Edward says “Won’t!” “If you suspect she’s alive, you just find her!” And she thought of her father’s latest canvases, now worth a sixth of a million each and rising, the ones he kept locked up in his damp woodshed behind the firewood, in case Clifford Wexford or his like got hold of them. Her father would surely part with them, for Nell’s sake. “I’ll pay anything you like.”

“It is nothing to do with money,” he says, hurt. “There is just nothing more I can do.”

This pale Englishwoman does nothing for the good of the world; he should by rights condemn her. How many thousands of children die each day the world over, either in spite of those who love them, or directly, at the hand of those who don’t; or starve because of the state’s indifference to their plight? She had nothing to do; why could she not spend her time helping them? But no, all she could do was sit, and be, and consider her own plight, and waste his time, and lie to her husband. By rights he should despise her; he found it painful to discover that in order to love, he did not have to admire. He took it as evidence of his own moral bankruptcy.

“There is nothing more I can do,” he repeats.

But she won’t have it. She rises and crosses to him and takes his hand and lightly kisses his cheek, and says, “Arthur, please!” using his Christian name, as she so rarely does, and he knows he will do anything for her, even waste his precious time on fruitless pursuits, and that nothing changes, time just passes.

At that moment the phone rings and it’s Clifford. Arthur watches Helen, and she does change, as if some new kind of energy now flows with the blood in her veins. It’s extraordinary. Her eyes become bright, her cheeks pink, her movements more animated, her voice lighter.

“It’s Clifford,” she says to Arthur, hand over the phone. “What shall I do? He wants to take me out to dinner.” Arthur shakes his head. Her love for Clifford is some kind of fearful drug: the more heady in the short term, the more poisonous in the long.

“Very well,” she says to Clifford, taking not the slightest notice of Arthur’s disapproval. Of course not. In fact, as she runs through the house, getting ready, she asks him—this dress, that coat, this scent, those shoes, will this suit me? does this look okay?—stopping only from time to time to hug poor Arthur, her thin, white arms actually around him.

“If Clifford and I could be friends, just friends—that’s all—” But of course that isn’t what she wants, and both of them know it.

“Arthur,” she says, “you will baby-sit, won’t you? I’ve no one else. And I’ll be back by eleven at the latest. I promise!”

R
EADER, ANGIE WELLBROOK HAD
spent that day preparing herself for her next day’s breakfast business-meeting with Clifford. She went to Harrods Hair and Beauty Salon and spent a great deal of time and money there. She upset a lot of people, as was her custom. She accused the beautician of not knowing her business, and the girl who waxed her legs of hurting her on purpose. (It is almost impossible to pull hairs by the thousand out of legs without hurting
at all
, and Angie’s leg hairs were dark, plentiful and tough.) She upset Eve—who did her nails, and must surely be the best manicurist in London, and never sneers at even the most unkempt hands and the most broken nails and who can keep her cool when faced by the rudest and most demanding of clients—by blaming her for breaking an already cracked nail. Angie had
very
long fingernails, of the blood-red clawed kind, the sort which it is tempting to believe only women without children have, or those who have other women to do their housework. (Though this may be wishful thinking—more likely it’s just that they have very, very tough nails and always wear gloves.)

Angie wanted children. That is to say, she wanted Clifford’s children. Angie wanted to found a dynasty; and here she was, closer to forty than to thirty, and nothing had happened yet! No wonder she was so cross in Harrods, but the staff there wasn’t to know the reason, and mightn’t have been all that sympathetic if they had. The fewer little Angies around, they might well have felt, the better. In the hair salon she made Phoebe comb out her hair
four
times, and she still didn’t like the result—that is to say, Angie wanted her hair full and frothy (absurd considering her plain, businesslike face) and Philip wanted it simple to the point of severity. But Angie would have her own way and, by the time she had it, Philip’s next client had been waiting half an hour. Nor would Angie pay extra—oh no!

Now the client Angie kept waiting was none other than Sir Larry Patt’s new blonde young friend Dorothy, the one who was consoling Sir Larry in the months after the sudden, blazing departure of Rowena his wife. Her leaving, as you may remember, was accompanied by startling revelations on her part as to her many and persistent infidelities through the years of marriage. (Reader, never believe in the discretion of your partner. If there is anything to be disclosed, sooner or later it will be disclosed, though it may take years; in the course of passion, or remorse, or rage, or whatever, or even just for dramatic effect, the truth will be spoken. With any luck, of course, it won’t be believed. But said it will be!) Larry Patt did believe Rowena when she told him about her affair with Clifford. And the knowledge of it, I may say, relieved him of guilt about Dorothy, whom he’d been seeing on and off for years, long, long before Rowena and Clifford had held eyes across a fashionable dinner-table. Dorothy had been a conductress on London Transport; she was one of those pretty, lively, energetic young things who like to help old-fashioned gentlemen up and down the stairs on the route from Chiswick through Knightsbridge to Piccadilly. Dorothy was pleased enough now to give up work, leave her aged father to her brother to look after, and move into the Albany flat with Sir Larry and spend her days shopping and trying to lose the muscles in the back of her legs. Sir Larry was forty years older than she, but who was counting?

Dorothy was nice as pie to Philip in Harrods Hair and Beauty Salon that day, even though he kept her waiting a full half-hour. Angie of course did not recognize Dorothy as they passed each other—how could she? It was just one of those coincidences you and I know about, reader, in the course of this story, which our protagonists do not. Angie was wearing a white mink coat. Not the same one as before, of course. She’d sold that. (She hadn’t given it away, of course, to someone poor and cold. No. The rich stay rich because they’re mean.) Dorothy had a really nice hairdo, however, and was in and out of the salon in twenty minutes, and Angie was still wrangling away at the desk—by now refusing to pay anything at all and even threatening to sue Eve for damages to her nails—some time after Dorothy had paid and left. In Angie’s defense, she was nervous about the next day’s meeting with Clifford. I mention this matter of Angie and Dorothy crossing paths as a demonstration of how all our lives interlink. Angie had slept with Clifford who’d slept with Rowena who’d slept with Sir Larry Patt (just) who was with Dorothy, who if you ask me was the pleasantest-natured of them all, and at least knew what it was to work for a living. Heaven knows just how the girl in the bakery where you buy your doughnuts may be linked to you. Or come to that, the local Master of Foxhounds.

That night Angie dined with Sylvester, her halfhearted, live-in, art-critic lover, and thought what a lugubrious fellow he was, and wondered why he didn’t own up and just go off with their handsome young waiter, instead of trying so hard not to be seen looking at him. Angie would certainly not miss Sylvester in her bed. Sometimes he and she discussed marriage—they got on well together, had the same interests and preoccupations; it suited them to share their houses in various parts of the world, since thus they could halve the insurance on their personal art collections, and they liked to have their orange juice and black coffee together in the mornings, and get excited about art prices. He escorted her here, and she escorted him there, thus saving the other’s face. They were invited out as a couple twice as often as each would be invited out singly, and both liked outings. And they entertained together—the private patrons and critical
cognoscenti
of the Art World and enjoyed that—but more? No. (Though, reader, would
you
not settle for that? I think I very well might, if I moved in such circles—forget the girl in the bakery, forget the Master of Foxhounds. It’s who you have breakfast with that counts.)