The Hearts and Lives of Men (28 page)

Money changed hands.

“Where did you find it?” asked Clifford, when the painting was safely in his possession.

“I was clearing an attic in Blackheath for some old lady,” said Roache. Clifford’s heart leaped. Vincent van Gogh used to walk from Ramsgate to Blackheath (and think nothing of it) during his early years in England.

“Any others?” asked Clifford, but this had been the only painting, amongst piles of old clothes and pieces of brass bed. He’d bought the lot for £3.50 and had already taken in £30. This brought it up to £35. Not bad going.

“It isn’t anything special?” asked Roache, nervously, as Clifford left. He felt uneasy. Something was wrong. No dealer likes to be made a fool of. Losing face is worse than losing money.

“Only a van Gogh,” said Clifford, and Roache thought of suing, but didn’t. Not only had he let £35,000 worth of painting slip through his hands, but there was nothing he could do about it. He’d made a colossal profit out of the old lady’s ignorance, and Clifford had made a colossal profit out of his. He hadn’t slipped the old lady anything extra; he didn’t expect Clifford to slip him anything. Clifford didn’t. The painting is today, of course, worth a dozen or so million. I ask you!

It made the headlines, of course it did.
ART WHIZ KID’S FANTASTIC FIND, GENIUS AMONGST THE JUNK
, and many a note in the quality papers. Everyone who was anyone knew all about it! It shook the antique world, too. Every forgotten stack of dirty old paintings in the country (and there were hundreds of them in those days—not anymore) was leafed through and cleaned up—but not another
VINCENT
materialized. Of course not. It took Clifford’s luck.

Clifford’s luck! That was what so delighted Helen and Clifford—the sheer fluke of it, oh the cleverness of it, the proof of his ability to tell the great from the insignificant: Clifford’s fingers so well and truly on the pulse of the great beating vein of art, all mixed up somehow with the power of love, the richness of sex, their finding each other again—oh, there was no end to their triumph. They didn’t sell the painting—of course not!—they hung it above the marble fireplace and it glowed, it
glowed
—not sunflowers, of course—but poppies.

John Lally, when he heard about it, said that Clifford was in league with the devil. But everyone knew that anyway so what was all the fuss about?

Helen said to Evelyn, secretly, for of course she was barred from entering Applecore Cottage again—Mother, if
money’s
any help, but Evelyn said no, it wasn’t. She was looking tired, Helen thought. Evelyn loved little Edward. She said he looked like John.

Angie called from South Africa to congratulate Clifford on his find. She sounded genuinely happy for him. He’d have to stage an Impressionist Renaissance, she supposed. She gave him ten years to raise the value of Vincent’s
Poppies
to a million. Anything less would be a disgrace. She hoped the painting matched Helen’s curtains.

Cynthia said to Otto, “I suppose we’ll see less of our son now.”

“Good,” said Otto, adding hastily, “now that he’s back with Helen, and happy.” But the truth was, he valued the quietness of his weekends these days, undisturbed by Clifford’s chatter. He found the excitement and agitation over the van Gogh painting vulgar. Van Gogh had lived and died in penury and obscurity; that successive generations should respond to his work was one thing; that they should profit by it, another.

“Perhaps they’ll have children,” said Cynthia, hopefully. She felt not as young as once she used to be. She had no lover. Young men were available, still easily charmed and amazed, but these days she felt the indignity of her situation, and theirs. She had liver spots on the backs of her hands. It just would not do, anymore. Except that in the vacuum left by their departing, old age seemed to rush in. She felt that if Clifford and Helen ever gave another baby into her charge, she would this time certainly give it more personal attention. Nell’s life had been so short: if only Cynthia had known, how differently she would have behaved; how much less censorious of Helen she would have been. She had failed Clifford as a mother; she had not given him the love and support a child deserved, nor of course had Otto. She wanted another chance, with another child. She gave all her attention, in the meantime, to Otto; but even as she gave up the excitements of the clandestine, so Otto found them again. Strange men would call, bearing news she was not supposed to hear. He wore an abstracted, important look; the phone would ring, then abruptly stop; Otto would leave the house, as many hours after as the number of rings. Well, it kept him young. She did not suppose it was dangerous. And downstairs Johnnie sang and polished the old horse brasses and seemed much less slow of speech and thought than usual.

Helen went back to College and took a course in Fabric Design. Clifford did not object. She was not his child-bride any more. He had learned a lot, inadvertently, from Fanny, Elise, Bente and so forth, especially Fanny. He thought of Fanny quite often. She had fought back, and lost, but he’d listened more than she knew. And her taste had been good. He wondered where she was working. She might be quite useful to Leonardo’s, now she’d had more experience.

Clifford wrote a magnificent book on the Impressionists, which sold at £20, an impossible price for a book in those days, even an art book, but it became a best-seller. Harry Blast, the TV art critic, damned it so ferociously—he’d never forgiven Clifford for making a fool of him—for its easy populism that everyone went out and bought it. The only place it’s good to have enemies is on the TV screen.

Leonardo’s ran smoothly; Angie kept her distance; a Rembrandt Exhibition broke all records for attendance. Then a David Firkin retrospective—and it was a bold step, the first time a contemporary painter had exhibited in the Great Hall—outdid even the Rembrandt in popularity. Leonardo’s, like Clifford, could do no wrong. The Queen opened a new annex where experts, as a free public service, priced and gave their verdict on works of art—to the annoyance of antique dealers, who saw their profits whipped away from under their noses, as the public lost its ignorance. Three rather good early Georgian town-houses were demolished to make room for the annex, which was in new brutalist concrete, but that kind of thing was happening all the time, and no one protested, or not much. There just seemed so much of old London around. You could go on pulling it down forever, and not even notice—

As soon as Helen’s divorce from Simon came through, Clifford and Helen married, in the Kensington Registry Office. It was a muted affair, for the following reason—that Evelyn died, just a week before the ceremony.

I
T WAS WITH SOME
trepidation, you will understand, that Helen had told her parents that she meant to divorce Simon and remarry Clifford. The Lallys had been occasional, if not frequent, visitors to the Cornbrook household in Muswell Hill. John Lally had not been an easy guest; he would keep lapsing into some diatribe or other about some new villainy perpetrated by the government, or big business, or what he referred to as the Art Industry, all engaged as they were in a conspiracy against the poor, the weak, and the creative artists of this world. Helen was used to it. Simon was not. John Lally would be right in principle but seldom in detail so Simon would see it as his duty to correct the facts, and his father-in-law would then take offense. And no matter how Helen would explain that her husband was in fact sympathetic, and not at all the fascist media-man, on the contrary. And no matter how poor Evelyn (who had begun to look thin and gaunt) would tremble with upset, and beg him to desist, he would not be pacified. And nor would Simon.

And Evelyn had a habit of comparing little Edward’s progress with Nell’s at the same age, and Simon did not like too much talk of Nell, because it upset Helen, and because anyway Edward did lag rather behind Nell. At two he had barely a few words, while Nell had been talking whole sentences—“Yes, Mum,” Helen would say, “but little girls do speak earlier than little boys.” And once she explained, “Boys develop their motor skills earlier.”

“What funny language they do use these days,” was all Evelyn replied. “Motor skills!” Oh, she was sad! “Of course, John and I only had the one child, and that was a girl,” she added once, as Helen put a plate of rather good mushroom soup in front of her, as if somehow Helen was nothing to do with her anymore, and why hadn’t she been a boy anyway, and that upset Helen even more. She brooded for days. She could not get near her mother, who was locked into some kind of misery-
a-deux
with her father. Helen could not bear to see it, or consider her own part in it and would be glad when her parents went home: relieved of some terrible burden she scarcely understood.

“Why did they only have you?” Simon asked, once.

“I think I cried too much at night when I was a baby,” Helen replied, vaguely. “So John couldn’t concentrate. Yes, I think that was it.”

Oh yes, the artist is as much monster as he’s allowed to be. Evelyn had four abortions, put off until the last moment in the hope of John Lally’s relenting. He hadn’t.

“Have as many babies are you want,” he said, “just don’t have them anywhere near me,” in the same spirit as he would say, if she ventured any kind of complaint, “If you don’t like it, leave. I’m not stopping you.”

Evelyn hadn’t called his bluff. She should have. Evelyn waited, and waited in vain, for the kind word from him to give her the courage she needed. Absurd! She neither stayed, as it were, or left. She just let all that red life-blood go to waste—let out the sons who might have laughed their father to shame—for fear of her husband’s temper, her husband’s moods. So that Helen, unprotected by the host of chattering, willful, demanding siblings she should have had, withstood alone the full blast of her father’s temperament. Moreover, she had learned, on the whole, her mother’s way of dealing with it—badly, by meek words and deference, with just the occasional jollying along. And meeting much the same nature in Clifford—attracting him and being attracted as is the fate of such daughters—she dealt with it equally badly.

Of course the marriage to Clifford collapsed: she had in him not quite a father, not quite a husband, more like a husfather. Of course, the weight of that unnaturalness proving too great, she then turned to Simon, a kind of long-lost brother, long-lost out of all existence—and why? Because she’d cried too much as a baby. Helen’s fault! All Helen’s fault! But how could Simon, husbrother, do her any better? How she flailed about, poor Helen, the victim of her neuroses, wondering why happiness eluded her—and now here she was, trying Clifford again, and just possibly, just possibly this time she’d do better.

And then, of course, leaving Simon and going back to Clifford, she was barred from Applecore Cottage once again. She found it almost a relief. She called her mother from time to time, out of a sense of duty, and sometimes met her, secretly, for lunch at Biba’s, and tried not to feel persecuted by her mother’s unhappiness, which clouded her own joy.

When the divorce was through and the date for the wedding fixed she spoke to her mother on the phone: “I know John won’t come, but will you please, please.”

“Darling, it would upset your father so much if I did. You know that. You shouldn’t ask. But you’ll get on perfectly well without me. And since you’ve been living with Clifford for nearly a year, and were married to him once before, a ceremony’s rather pointless, isn’t it? How’s little Edward? Is he talking better?”

“She won’t come, she won’t come,” Helen wept into Clifford’s shoulder. “It’s all your fault!” Oh, she was getting bolder.

“What do you want me to do? Give him his paintings back?”

“Yes.”

“So he can cut them up with the garden shears?” He would, too.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Why can’t I have parents like yours?”

“Be thankful you don’t,” he said. “I’ll tell you what—go down and beard them in their den.
Make
them come. Both of them. I promise to be nice.”

“I’m too frightened.”

“No you’re not,” he said. And, oddly, she wasn’t.

So Helen comes down to Applecore Cottage, one Saturday morning, flushed and excited, full of thoughts of Clifford, and determined her parents will be happy for her happiness, pushing open the door, letting sunlight in to the tiny living-room where Evelyn is accustomed to sit and knit or shell peas and wait for John to appear from studio or garage, in the expectation of either a tirade or a day or so of not-talking, for some fault or act of hers—years old, perhaps—which John has remembered as he stands at his easel; stirring the flake-white or the meridian-blue or the ochre, pondering the nature of color itself, or its appearance in living flesh, rotting flesh, frozen flesh, simmering flesh or whatever that day absorbs him, layering it upon layer, knowing how much better it would be if only he could drum up some intensity of response. But he can’t—it has to be poached from somewhere, now that he’s no longer young. And paranoia provides a kind of passion and who better (now he so seldom leaves home) to provide the source material for that than Evelyn—and didn’t Clifford remark upon it long ago—that Evelyn was part of the gestalt in which John Lally functioned as a painter—

Evelyn knew it. There she sits in the half-dark: the sacrifice. Somehow the room is only dark because she sits there. These days she attracts gloom, the fates move mistily behind her. Helen—coming in with the shaft of sunshine, all things possible again because she is to be with Clifford, and heart, mind and soul are set free, albeit free to tremble and fail as well—sets them moving. The room’s haunted, Helen thinks. Why didn’t I ever notice? The polished copper pans, hanging from their hooks, sway and tremble as if in a huge wind, but there is no wind.

“Something’s happened,” says Evelyn. “You’re different. What is it?”

“I want you to come to my wedding,” says Helen. “And John. Where is he?”

“In the attic, painting. Where else?”

“Is he in a good mood?”

“No. I told him you were coming.”

“How did you know? How could you possibly know?”