The Hearts and Lives of Men (26 page)

You have heard my views on coincidence, reader. I assure you, this is the kind of thing that happens. Mrs. Blotton, infertile, married Erich Blotton, who wanted children more than anything. If how, having the insurance money from the crash of ZOE 05, she gives it away to children’s homes, is that surprising? The world is not an enormous place—no, it is very small: circles within circles, wheels within wheels—look at Angie and Dorothy crossing paths, all unknowing, at Harrods! Just about everyone, so far as I can see, ends up encountering everyone else, the bit-part players in the story of their lives.

I
T IS PERHAPS JUST
as well that Clifford and Helen knew nothing of this. They are holding hands across a table and looking into each other’s eyes. Sometimes it seems that we can have our happiness only at someone else’s expense. While we celebrate our emotions here, someone suffers there, from our neglect.

“I have been faithful to you,” Clifford observes, which is extraordinary, under the circumstances.

“Trudi Barefoot?” Helen can’t help asking. Wouldn’t you?

“Who?” He’s joking. Trudi has a new film out. Her name is plastered all over the Western world.

“Elise O’Malley?”

“Ah begorah, where’s my pills?” He’s shocking! Merciless! And Elise so dependent and trusting!

“Serena Bailey, Sonia Manzi, Gertie Lindhoff, Bente Respigi, Candace Snow—” She knows a lot of their names, though not quite all.

“You can’t believe what you read in the papers,” he says, “at least I hope you can’t. Or what about the dwarf and Janice Best?”

There now! He’s forgotten and referred to Simon as “the dwarf.” Helen takes away her hand.

“I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “You know I’m just jealous.”

That’s better! Helen smiles. Three years now since Nell was lost. She’s allowed to smile. And Clifford will allow her to cling to her illusion, if illusion it be, that Nell still lives, and she once again inhabits a world where all things are possible, even happiness.

Reader, after dinner (which cost only some £15, the year being what it is, and Clifford never one to spend extravagantly), Clifford and Helen went back to his house in Orme Square and spent the night together. The cost of that one evening, for the three couples out dining, if it were to include Angie’s new gold-leafed shoes, certainly came to over £750, the amount Mrs. Blotton was donating to the Eastlake Assessment Center. Nell’s supper of fish fingers and baked beans, followed by jam tart, costing out at
6d.
If there is any such thing as actual immorality, I think it lies herein, that the haves in this world have so much, and the have-nots so little.

Arthur Hockney, left to baby-sit
all night
without even the courtesy of a phone call, was paid nothing for his pains. Poor Arthur! If you leave out the night his parents were killed and the day he told his mentors he was betraying them, would not after all join the Civil Rights movement, these were the most painful few hours of his life. He didn’t need to be psychic to know what was happening. Who would?

Reader, if you are married, do your best to stay married. If you are unmarried, the cynical might say, take care only to fall in love with someone you
dislike
, for you may very well end up divorced, and the worst thing about divorcing, being divorced, is how you have to practice hate, have to learn to loathe and despise the one you used to love and admire, so as to persuade yourself that nothing much has been lost. Wanker! Wally! Him? Her? Good riddance to bad rubbish! The practice of hate is very bad for the character—and terrible for the children! But if you could only start out from a point of dislike, the effort and distress involved would surely be far less. At least you wouldn’t have to change your view of the whole universe, and all the people in it. Black could stay black, and white white.

Clifford and Helen, reunited once again that night, in the pretty little Georgian house in Orme Square, laughing, talking and happy, could hardly remember why they had hated each other so much. She could see his infidelities as mere manliness; his meanness as prudence; his absorption in his work as only reasonable; herself as having married too young and not giving Clifford what he needed.

“I was only ever trying to make you jealous!” she said to him, standing lithe and lovely in the marble shower, in a cloud of steam which, like a gauze over a film camera, made her seem to Clifford mistier and more romantic than she had even appeared in his dreams—the good ones, not the bad. And he had, to be frank, dreamed of Helen a good deal, even in the company of Elise, Serena, Sonia, Gertie, Bente, Candace—and whoever.

Clifford for his part could now see Helen’s early infidelity as a symptom, not a cause, of the collapse of their marriage. His neglect of her, his selfishness, was to blame.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “so sorry! I regretted it so much, at once!

“You did nothing that I hadn’t done,” he said, and saw her eyes grow cold with jealousy, but only for a moment.

“I don’t want to hear,” she said. “I want to forget.”

“I behaved atrociously over Nell,” he said. “Poor Nell.”

“Lovely Nell,” she said. And there, they could talk about Nell, easily now, and incorporate her in their mutual pasts. Apologies are important things. World Wars start because they are not made, because no one is prepared to say
you were right, I was wrong.

So there they were, six years later, hand in hand, so much time and life wasted! And Simon Cornbrook, hand on heart, returning from Japan at five in the morning to repair his marriage, found Helen not in her marital bed, and Arthur the detective asleep on the couch, and little Edward asleep upstairs, coughing away, with a nasty croak in the cough which might at any moment turn into a really nasty attack of croup.

A
ND WHAT OF LITTLE
Nell, whom this irresponsible pair had tossed to the winds of fate? Oh yes, they were certainly irresponsible—they married each other and should have made at least some effort to put up with each other, once they had Nell. (What married people without children do with their lives is hardly of consequence. They can fly to different ends of the earth for all I care; they only harm each other and themselves and will soon cure.) Well, the night Clifford and Helen were reunited was the night that Nell, or Ellen Root as she now was, ran away from the Eastlake Center, away from stupid Horace and his punitive, drunken wife Annabel. Or at any rate that was how Nell saw them; not, I daresay, how they really were. Nell, in her short life, though accustomed to sudden, horrible events, had until now been cared for—apart from one day with Erich Blotton—by the most kindly, most sensitive, most responsive of folk, in the prettiest if sometimes rather eccentric surroundings. The Center, with its smell of cabbage, disinfectant and human despair mixed, and its brisk, tough, powerful staff, astonished rather than defeated her. Less traumatic than the aircrash, than when the devil had razed the château to the ground, than the calamity on the Route Nationale, even more amazing. And not pleasant! To stand in the bleakness of the Eastlake medical room, and have her head shaved! To see her pretty curls litter the worn gray linoleum floor! To have no one to embrace, no one to tell her stories, no one to sing to her—well, these she could put up with, for a time. But to be unable to love and be loved—if this went on it would be misfortune indeed—the worst of all the misfortunes, in fact, that could befall a small child, and Nell knew, instinctively, that she must leave, and soon. That anywhere was better than here! That there were good things and kind people in the world and that she must be off to find them.

It was Ellen Root’s seventh birthday—according to the East-lake Center. We know of course that in fact Nell was only six and a half. But seven is the magic age when children are supposed to be legally lit to go to school themselves—to traverse major trunk roads, to avoid the strangers who lie in wait—and Nell listened to Annabel telling her so and thought, if I am old enough to cross roads on my own, I am old enough to leave here, and never, never come back. That day, moreover, she had been sent to school for the first time in her life. So far she had attended the Infants’ Class at the Center, for children with Special Needs—that is to say whenever Annabel Lee saw fit to call it together, and could be bothered to organize the Water Play, or find the Sandbox. That she had found boring, but this she hated. A great, wild, clanging, clattering place, full of shrieks and yells and pinches and insults! And there was a tall gray woman there who kept teaching her to read, and wouldn’t believe her when she said she already could, and wouldn’t even hear her read, so Nell had stayed mute, and the woman had slapped her. No, Nell had to go!

When she came back from the terrible place called school (the others had proper homes to go to, and she had only the Eastlake Center, which they all knew, so they wouldn’t talk to her) Nell took a serviceable laundered pillowcase from the laundry room, and wrapped her few possessions in it. Sponge-bag, a thin towel, a pair of shoes already too small, a jersey, a yellow-haired rag doll given to her out of the funds so kindly donated by Mrs. Blotton, and the one item left of all her past—the tin teddy bear on a silver chain—which to retain she had smiled and charmed many a time. She went to bed in the dormitory as usual but kept herself awake—which was almost the most difficult part of the whole enterprise—and when she heard the hall clock strike nine, crept out of her bed, stole down the stairs, unlocked the heavy front door, and was out into the brilliant, starry night, into the big wild busy world, to seek her fortune.

“R
UN AWAY!” EXCLAIMED ANNABEL
Lee, when told by her husband Horace that little Ellen Root’s bed was empty, and the child was nowhere to be found. “The wicked, wicked child!” And she shoved her empty sherry bottle under the bed so her husband wouldn’t see it. It was a double marital bed but Horace slept mostly on a camp-bed in the attic, where he had his train set. It was an elaborate and wonderful system, electronically controlled, and the children might have appreciated it, if they had only been allowed up to see it. Which of course they weren’t.

Now “running away” is, next to arson, next to biting, the worst thing a child in an institution can do. The child who flees is seen as being monstrously, unthinkably ungrateful. Any institution, to those who run it, is a fine, kind and excellent place. If the child (or the prisoner, or the patient) cannot agree and acts accordingly, it is not only willful and wicked, but puts everyone to terrible and unnecessary trouble. The treatment is to pursue the runaways with great energy, haul them back, and then punish them severely for running, as if this will somehow finally endear the place to the ingrate, so they won’t do it again.

“That’ll learn you!” cries the grown-up world. Thwack, thwack! “That’ll learn you to like it! That’ll learn you to love us! That’ll learn you to be grateful!”

Annabel Lee set the dogs after little Ellen Root. Yes, really. She had no business doing it; certainly no authority would ever have consented to such an act; but remember Annabel Lee had drunk two-thirds of a bottle of sherry, while waiting for her husband Horace to finish playing trains and, perhaps, come to bed. (Quite a proportion of the money Mrs. Blotton had donated to Eastlake over the years had been spent on the train set, and no one who saw it—though that was almost no one—could deny it was wondrous. So delicate and intricate, with its tunnels and signals and trees and little wayside cottages complete with curtains and electric lights, and some really rare collector’s items by way of engines—including the fabulous Santa Fe—and the invoices just said “toys,” so who was there to query the expenditure? No one.)

“The dogs! The dogs! Unloose the dogs!” cried Annabel Lee, clambering out of bed, a heavy, incongruous figure in her fine silk nightie (which Horace took no notice of at all, but she never stopped trying). “We can’t call the police, there’ll only be a scandal! No end of a fuss, and her with nits in her hair, to bring us all into disgrace. What the little miss wants is a proper fright! We’ll give it to her, well and truly.”

As if, reader, poor little Nell hadn’t had a good deal too many frights in her life already.

Annabel Lee kept her two big, black, sleek dogs with their big jaws and sharp white teeth, in kennels, just around the side of the house, outside the dining-room, so the children could see them whenever they came down to a meal. The dogs calmed the children, said Annabel Lee. They certainly subdued them, especially since Kettle and Kim were kept hungry, and on the end of rattling chains just long enough to let the animals press their dripping jaws against the window, squashing their gums, magnifying their teeth.

“If you don’t stop doing that” (running in the corridor, forgetting to clean your comb, losing your socks or whatever), “I’ll feed you to the dogs!” Discipline at Eastlake was no problem at all.

When visitors or inspectors came, the dogs were moved to a compound at the very end of the long garden, and rabbits put in the kennels instead.

“How nice of the children to have pets!” said the visitor. “As well as so many toys! But where
are
all the toys? Broken, you say? Good Lord! But they’re disturbed, aren’t they, poor little things. How lucky they are to have you, Mrs. Lee; so warm and friendly and kind. What patience you must have. You put us all to shame!” They said it so often Annabel Lee herself quite believed it.

Most people, of course, believe that they’re good. Have you ever, reader, met anyone who thought they were wicked? But someone, somewhere, must be, or the world wouldn’t be in the state that it’s in, and on the very night that her parents were reunited—though to Arthur Hockney’s and Simon Cornbrook’s sorrow—our dear Nell wouldn’t be running over a warm, summery, moonlit stretch of Hackney Marshes, pursued by a couple of slavering, savage black dogs, and behind them, at the wheel of the Eastlake van, lights blazing, horn blaring, a drunken, equally slavering Annabel Lee.

Reader, I don’t want to insult Dobermans. Properly raised and kindly treated, they are the most elegant, responsive, gentle of creatures. It’s only when reared by someone like Annabel Lee that they become monsters. And if they had caught up with Nell, I really do believe they would quite probably have torn her to bits, out of the ferocity of their despair. They wanted to be civilized, but had been rendered savage, and hated it.