The Hearts and Lives of Men (29 page)

“I had such a dream last night,” is all Evelyn says. She has her hand on her head. “I have a headache. It’s a funny kind of headache. I dreamed you were standing hand in hand with Clifford. I dreamed I was dying; I had to die to set you free.”

“What do you mean?” Helen is distressed.

“You’re too much my daughter, not enough yourself. If you’re to be happy with Clifford, you have to be your father’s daughter, not mine.”

What is she talking about? And Helen hardly through the door, and strange shapes moving in the reflections from the swaying copper pans! Is Evelyn saying that if Helen marries Clifford she will disown her? But Evelyn goes on.

“You have to be with Clifford, I know that, for when Nell comes back.”

Helen’s mouth drops open.

“In the dream I cast a shadow over you. It was the only shadow there was. So much sunlight everywhere! Nell was walking through green fields. She’s nearly seven, you know. So like you when you were a little girl—except her hair, of course. That’s like Clifford’s.”

Helen perceives that her mother is rambling. There is something odd about the way she talks, about the way she slumps in the chair. She calls for her father, up in the attic studio. No one calls up the stairs like that—they’re not allowed. He’s painting, not to be disturbed. Careful, genius at work! But the note in Helen’s voice brings him down, running.

“It’s Evelyn—” says Helen.

“Such a headache,” says Evelyn. “A funny sort of headache. It’s made one bit of my head very clear and the other bit very fuzzy. I’d better just move over, get the shadow out of the way. Don’t worry about Nell. She’ll be back.”

She smiles at her daughter, seems blind to her husband, tries to lift her hand, can’t. Tries to move her head, can’t; and, looking puzzled, simply dies. Helen can tell, not because the head can’t lean any further into the chair than it’s leaning already, but that the light in the eyes goes out as if it’s switched off. The lids don’t even drop. It’s John Lally who closes them, although heaven knows he’s painted enough dead eyes in his life to be accustomed to such sights.

The doctor says Evelyn probably had two cerebral hemorrhages, possibly three, in the previous twenty-four hours, the last one being fatal.

Helen is left amazingingly at peace. It seems to her that Evelyn, in dying, was simply doing what she’d decided to do. The body had followed the will, obediently. She grieves, but there is a kind of happiness interweaving the grief, which seems Evelyn’s gift to her: the sense of life beginning, not ending; a vision of a future which included Nell. Helen rashly told John Lally about Evelyn’s dream. He said the balance of his wife’s mind was obviously already disturbed, and, incidentally, that if it wasn’t a sick joke, and Helen really did want to remarry Clifford, murderer of his grandchild, so far as he was concerned his daughter as well as his wife was dead. Well, he was upset. But you and I know, reader, that Evelyn had not so much a dream as a vision, the kind sometimes given to good people on the point of death, and that she had stayed alive long enough to hand it on to Helen, in recompense for all the many ways in which she had failed her daughter. It is almost impossible, reader, not to fail one’s children, one way or another. Inasmuch as our parents failed us.

I wish I could report that John Lally felt remorse for the way in which he had treated his wife during her lifetime, but I can’t. He contrived to refer to her—when he remembered her, which wasn’t often—as that fool of a woman. Well, there is something to be said for such honesty and consistency. Nothing worse than to hear a newly bereaved spouse talk about how kind and wonderful and good the deceased was, when you have heard them so bitter and reviling just a short while ago. We must try not to speak ill of the living, rather than to speak well of the dead. Time is so short for all of us.

H
OW FILMMAKERS LOVE FUNERALS
! How often do we not see them on the screen: the open grave, the desolate churchyard, the scattered mourners—everyone looks bleak and chilly and rather cross, as if it was the scene in the film they least liked making. You can almost hear the director’s voice: Okay, action. No, Maureen—or Rue, or Henry, or Wendy, or whoever—cut! For God’s sake! For the sixth time, you
throw
the earth, you don’t just drop it. Shall we do that again, please? Now, the sooner we get this right, the sooner we can all go home. And the wind whips around the legs of the false mourners, reproaching them for the way that this, even this, even death itself is chewed, chumped up, spat out in the interests of plot, profit and fantasy. And even then they seldom get it right—the gritty weariness of it all; the horrid mystery of the coffin; the grisly fate of the mortal remains; the one we knew or loved made nothing, finished, over; the preacher’s voice lost in the wind; the sense of futility—oh yes, then at the graveside the tide of our good cheer is at its lowest ebb. How swiftly the generations pass, to no good end, or observable purpose. Why bother with life, the open grave suggests, since death swallows everything up? We even lose our sense of future, the knowledge that as the earth turns, so the water surges up and over and in once more—no, how can the director get all that?

Of course the cameras seldom even
try
to get the spirit of the cremation parlor. What is there here to impress the eye? The more than conventional room, like some suburban dream out of 1950; the plastic flowers; the droning Muzak; the all-purpose preacher; the coffin disappearing on rollers through cinema curtains—not even into the fiery furnace, but simply to be stacked and stored. And whose ashes do you get back, anyway? Yours? Who believes it! Does it matter? Of course not. The preacher gabbles (twenty services a day), gets his facts wrong, misjudges the deceased, his congregation, yet does his best. It will do. This is the swift, the kindly, the pathetic disposal of the dead. In death we are all ordinary. Let it be.

Evelyn was cremated. John Lally would not attend. Helen, he said, had to choose between having him there, or Clifford. She chose Clifford, since he had never done her mother any harm. On the contrary, Clifford had damp-proofed Evelyn’s home, waterprooofed her roof, and indirectly provided her with scrag-ends to make many an excellent stew. The villagers of Appleby turned up in number to the funeral. Evelyn had been liked and pitied, and her loyalty to her impossible husband respected. Besides, word had gotten around that Clifford would be there. Clifford Wexford of Leonardo’s, whiz kid and publicist, celebrity. He had his own monthly TV program now on BBC, “Finding Your Way Through Art,” and though few of them watched it, many of them knew about it. (It wasn’t, I am sure, the only reason they came—but the crematorium
was
some way from the village and the numbers
were
remarkable.)

Otto and Cynthia Wexford came, in support of Helen. They would be her parents now, since her mother was dead, and her father, in their eyes, once they heard of his behavior, worse than dead.

Clifford had been surprisingly forgiving.

“As an artist,” he says, “he makes little distinction between life and death. That’s what his work is all about.”

“You mean he’s mad,” said Otto.

“Half-mad,” said Clifford.

“Poor little Helen,” said Cynthia. And then, with that kind of sudden intuition which seemed to come out of nowhere and always impressed her family, added, “I expect now her mother’s dead, she’ll cope with you better.”

“I don’t need coping with,” said Clifford. “I’m the easiest man to get along with in the world—” but he laughed; at least he knew it wasn’t true.

“Like God,” remarked his mother. She wore fabulous black to the funeral, and a red red rose in her hat. Helen wore the old coat she had worn the night she first met Clifford. She’d never thrown it out. She wasn’t sure why, any more than she knew quite why it seemed the right thing to wear to her mother’s funeral. It wasn’t as if Evelyn had liked it much. But it seemed a token of defiance and love, mixed, which she supposed was apt. She felt she had her mother’s blessing.

Anyway, Otto and Cynthia had forgiven her, for whatever it was that had to be forgiven: all the awfulness over the divorce, the arguments about custody of Nell—and she, Helen, must in those days have seemed so very much the villainess. She could see that. But then, after the air disaster, they’d been so shocked and grieved for Nell, so upset by Clifford’s part in it—and not just that, but his determination to go on blaming Helen long after the need for it had gone, they’d come to have sympathy for her. John Lally, in their eyes, was now the ogre of the piece. He would do very well to shovel the shit upon, if you will excuse the expression, reader. And I must say, I suffer from the temptation myself. Shit must be shoveled. Helen loves Clifford; I am trying hard to love him too. He loves her; that makes it easier. They are Nell’s parents. If we love Nell we must do our best to love her mother and her father both; just as, if we are to love ourselves, we must come to terms with both our parents. Hate one or both, and we hate half or all of ourselves, and it does us no good.

N
OW EVELYN’S VISION OF
little Nell was more or less correct. She romped in the sunlight, in the green fields of Faraway Farm. Farm it was called, but Clive and Polly, its owners, were not so much farmers as criminals, immigrants from London’s East End. The place was more of a hideaway for people on the run, and items of value in transit, than for cows, milk, cream and apple trees. It wasn’t the cleanest place in the world, either, and Polly’s idea of cooking was baked beans on burned toast or, better still, plenty of smoked salmon and champagne, or anything you could eat or drink with no bother at all. All the same, Polly felt herself to be a country girl at heart, and though most of Faraway Farm’s twenty acres lay fallow, or were hired out as grazing to neighboring farmers, she would grow the prettiest of creepers over the barns where stolen goods were kept, and where, later, LSD and cocaine were to be manufactured. And, when they were in the money, she’d take a trip to the local garden center, and come home to plant flowers already in bloom. So really, as a thieves’ den, it was a prettier place, albeit overgrown, than in the sterner days of its farmhood.

But, reader, I think I go too fast. This is what happened when Nell was discovered at the back of the van on its arrival, in the early hours of the morning, with its loot from the Greatest Antiques Robbery of the century (or so the press called it, though by right they should have said “century so far” for there were still more than twenty-five years to go till its end). Clive and Beano and Polly and Rady heaved out a Chippendale bookcase—carelessly and forever losing a precious chip of inlay, I’m afraid—and then eight very nice little English landscapes (the Rembrandts and van Goghs had been left behind—almost impossible to find a home for stolen major works of art, they’re too recognizable) and then a massive pair of Jacobean silver candlesticks—and there crouched at the back was thin little, grubby little, sleepy little, bald-pated Nell.

They helped her out into the sun.
Now
what were they to do? Reader, quite frankly, I hate to think of what might have happened. The most logical thing to do to a witness to a crime, if you are the criminal, is to silence her forever.

But Nell looked around, at the early sun striking the old stone, and the clematis everywhere, and Polly’s white cat stretching and sunning itself, and said:

“Isn’t it all pretty!” (And I can tell you, reader, compared to the Eastlake Center, it certainly was!) And Clive and Polly, and Beano and Rady, all smiled. Once they had smiled, she was safer.

“What you need is a bath,” said Polly, and once Nell had had a bath she was safer still.

Then she shared their breakfast, of Weetabix and cream from the farm next door, and after that what could they do, except keep her for their own?

Nell talked about running away from savage dogs, but they didn’t believe anyone could be so wicked as to set savage dogs on a child! She said her name was Ellen Root but Polly and Rady didn’t like that. Polly said she’d always liked Nell as a name, so that was what she was called. Polly was a great one for extrasensory preception: she told fortunes from tea-leaves, cast the I Ching, and saw ghosts. Perhaps indeed she had psychic powers. Certainly it was extraordinary that she settled on Nell as a name.

Polly was a wide, laughing, yellow-haired, quick-tempered young woman. Rady was small and thin and brooding and idle. Clive was thin and lithe, and Beano tall and fat. All were under thirty. All believed the next crime would make their fortune, and they could move off to Rio de Janeiro or somewhere exciting and live in luxury together. But somehow they never did; they stayed at Faraway Farm.

Nell’s hair grew quickly, and her little face opened out in happiness and contentment. They saw that she was pretty. She picked up a pencil and drew a sketch of Polly’s cat, and it was really good and they were proud of her. She was not John Lally’s grandchild for nothing. Though fortunately she had inherited only his talent, and not his difficult nature.

“We’d better keep her,” said Clive to Polly. “Pretend she’s ours, send her to school, join the PTA, that kind of thing. Join in with the locals.”

“Me, be a mother!” said Polly in astonishment. The feckless creature had what a psychologist would call “a low self-image.” She had never somehow believed she was capable of having a proper marriage, or a proper husband, let alone a proper baby. So here she was at the age of twenty-eight, having achieved exactly what she expected of life. (This is about the age when we discover that our view of ourselves is pretty accurate—or have had years enough to make it so.) But then she said, “Why not? At least I won’t have to go through being pregnant, and losing my figure,” which was odd, since she had no figure at all to speak of. But young women who have taken a lot of LSD—this was the early seventies, and LSD a real craze—or even a little, do seem to have trouble connecting up with reality. They see the world as they want to see it, not how it is. If they choose to believe there is food in the cupboard, they don’t go shopping, whether there is or not. If it’s too much trouble for the time to be eight o’clock, and Nell’s bedtime, why then the clock reads seven, Polly would stake her life on it! Now there are certain advantages for a child who is brought up this way—a general cheerfulness and let-it-all-hang-out feel to life—but disadvantages too. You do have to learn to fend for yourself and your parents as well, pretty young—to somehow obtain money for food and get to the store yourself, however small you are; to get yourself to bed, no matter how many zonked-out bodies you have to climb over to do so, with psychedelic music in your ears, not bedtime stories. Children like order, security and routine, and if they’re not given it, tend to impose it upon themselves. Nell did well enough.