The Hearts and Lives of Men (34 page)

Cynthia turned to Otto.

“We could buy such a nice place in Knightsbridge,” she said. “I need never wear green Wellingtons again.”

“But I thought you liked—”

“Only for your sake, darling—”

“But I was doing it for your sake—”

Lies, all lies, but they knew how to keep each other happy. To do exactly what they wanted, while pretending it was only for the other that they did it. Even her affairs had been to reassure him that she was desired by other men, and therefore desirable. Or that was how she liked to see it.

“Half a million might be putting it a little high,” said Angie.

“I think half a million sounds exactly right,” said Otto. “Inasmuch as we can keep it a private arrangement, and spare you the cost of real-estate agents—”

And so it was settled, and Angie bought Dannemore Court. That would surprise Clifford, Helen and the three children. They were due some surprises, Angie thought, really quite nasty ones.

A
NGIE VISITED JOHN AND
Marjorie Lally in their home at Applecore Cottage. The couple was getting along just fine. It was Marjorie’s habit to smile, as it had been Evelyn’s to weep.

“Don’t be absurd, John!” she’d say, when he was unreasonable. “Oh, what a bad temper!” she’d exclaim, apparently unmoved, when he ranted and raved. “John, you
can’t
be talking about me. You must be talking about yourself!” she’d say, if he called her names.

He tried in a hundred ways to get the better of her, but couldn’t. If he didn’t speak to her she seemed not to notice, but fetched the neighbors in for coffee and talked to them instead. She made plans to include him but if he didn’t turn up or was late, simply went without him. She spoke about her own feelings, never his. She threw out all Evelyn’s shabby old furniture, and brought in properly restored antiques, with no handles missing, no strips of beading put in one of the drawers for safety, presently to be hidden by junk. She got rid of the copper pans and had a window put in, so that bright direct light streamed into the cottage. She had a custom-made kitchen built for a sum which quite shocked the village. She sent her clothes to Oxfam at the end of every season and bought new. She made an inventory of John’s work. She understood the predicament he was in artistically, and kept saying so. She did her own embroidery—she exhibited in the Victoria and Albert, and had some small reputation, in a minor field, as she kept stressing—although she worked only when John himself was working. Otherwise she put it by, the better to concentrate her attention on her husband.

Oh, she was a wonderful wife. He didn’t deserve her, everyone said. Mind you, she had her own source of income. That made it easier for her. That she did not have to ask him for money.

He was seldom in the pub, these days. He liked his wife’s company, her steady smile. She would be in bed first, pretending to sleep. If he woke her, she woke cheerful and willing. If he didn’t, she slept on. Perfect! He thought his work suffered. He had started painting pictures of sun over dappled waters, and pumpkins in kitchens. He lost interest in death and decay. He wondered if she was too old to have a baby. She said she wasn’t. They tried.

She made John meet Helen in London, at a show at the new Haymarket Gallery. He drew the line at meeting Clifford. Helen came. He could hardly remember what all the trouble had been about. She put her hand in his, and he let it be, feeling some kind of remembered warmth.

“I think I used to be a bit mad,” he said. It was an apology. She accepted it. But she had very little to say to Marjorie, who seemed pleasant enough. She ought to have been grateful, but wasn’t.

“Be glad he has her,” said Clifford. “It takes the weight of daughterhood off you. And wait to see how the paintings change.”

He sent Johnnie down to photograph the recent paintings by infrared light, while Applecore Cottage slept, and noted the change not in style but in content. The paintings were not, Clifford thought, as good as they had been, but were actually much more salable. Well, you won some, and lost some, and this might be the break he’d been waiting for. The Tate was teetering on the brink of buying a Lally canvas for £8,000. Not bad. But the deal hadn’t come through.

Helen found out that Marjorie was pregnant and wept and wept.

“It’s terrible,” she said. “Edward and Max and Marcus will be older than their aunt. It’s unnatural.”

“It might be a boy,” said Clifford. “Their uncle.”

She hadn’t thought of that and cried even more. But it wasn’t any of that she really minded. She wept for poor Evelyn, who never got what she wanted, and died thinking the getting of it was impossible. And because what Evelyn couldn’t get, Marjorie could so easily.

A
NYWAY, AS I SAY,
as soon as Angie had put the purchase of Dannemore Court in motion, she went down one Sunday to visit John and Marjorie at Applecore Cottage. John was polite, civil, sober and shaved, and Marjorie was in a smock. She was pregnant. They talked over roast lamb and red-currant jelly (homemade by Evelyn; the last of the jars) and they talked about Clifford Wexford, although Marjorie tried to put a stop to it.

“Of course,” said Angie, “your contract with Leonardo’s can’t possibly be enforced. It’s unnatural restraint of trade. We can take it to the European Court. In effect, this contract confines you to painting only three paintings a year, thus keeping the prices of all existing paintings high, but all and sundry benefiting more than you. The galleries profit; you lose. How much a year is your retainer?”

“Two thousand a year.”

Angie laughed. “Miserable!” she said. “Exploitation.”

“Of course,” said John Lally, “I paint very many more canvases than three a year. I just keep the others off the market.”

“He keeps them in the bicycle shed,” said Marjorie.

“I’d love to see them,” said Angie.

John Lally said some other time: the step was broken; the path was muddy; the light was bad. Angie said she’d been at a party with Clifford Wexford. He’d been telling the story of how the painter had barged in on him and Helen all those years ago. How he’d knocked John Lally down. Clifford was jealous, Angie said, that was all it was. He was the kind of man who longed to be a creative artist and couldn’t. She was surprised John Lally hadn’t stopped him from marrying his daughter the second time. Once was bad enough.

“No daughter of mine,” said John Lally. “She killed my wife.”

“Now, John—” said Marjorie, warningly.

“Don’t you ‘now, John’ me,” said John Lally, old-style.

“Old-style, John,” said Marjorie. He subsided.

After what happened to Nell, said Angie. Of course Helen was my friend then. It was at my place she had to see the child, when Clifford was being so difficult. If it hadn’t been for Clifford, said Angie, right out, Nell would still be alive. Clifford got away with too much, and here was John Lally just sitting back and letting him, and for the sake not just of John Lally, but of every living, breathing, suffering, exploited artist in the world, it had to stop. Could she, Angie, see inside John Lally’s bicycle shed? She, Angie, took only ten percent as a gallery owner, and arranged initial sales on a royalty basis, so that the artist got twenty percent of all profit on subsequent sales.

John Lally took Angie to the bicycle shed. See me as your friend, she said. We’ll drag Leonardo’s through the courts. Let the world see what kind of art-lovers they are! So we will, said John Lally, so we will!

Marjorie said to John Lally she rather doubted that Angie was anyone’s friend, but for once he wasn’t listening.

A
NGIE LUNCHED WITH SIMON
Cornbrook at the Dorchester, and mentioned that Clifford was having an on-off affair with a woman colleague at Leonardo’s, Fanny by name. It had been going on for years, since Clifford’s days in Geneva. Simon Cornbrook refrained from passing on the news to Helen, his ex-wife. He had no reason to like Clifford, but he had no wish to make his ex-wife suffer. There
are
some really nice people in the world, I assure you.

Angie called Clifford and arranged to meet him for breakfast at Claridges.

“Not again!” said Clifford.

“Just once more,” said Angie. “It’s quite safe. We’re beyond that now!”

“You may be,” said Clifford. “I’m not.”

He turned up at Claridges to find Angie wearing a white silk suit which shimmered and shone, even if Angie herself did not, belted by a very nifty glittering chain which might have been studded with
diamanté
but Clifford had a pretty shrewd idea was diamond and not industrial grade either. Presented with such a belt, and the opportunity of undoing it, it is difficult not to do so, if only to watch it glitter as it falls to the ground. Clifford undid it.

“I don’t know how you can have Simon Cornbrook under your roof,” said Angie, the whirlwind out of South Africa, safe in the comfy Claridges’ brass bed.

“Helen says it’s civilized.”

“She would, wouldn’t she. How come the twins look so much like him?”

And Angie had only just begun.

R
EADER, ANGIE BECAME PREGNANT
by Clifford Wexford. She meant to. She had the timing right. Luck was on her side, as it frequently is of the wicked. The devil does indeed seem to look after his own. Angie was forty-two—no age to get pregnant at the drop of a hat, or the fall of a diamond belt from a white silk suit in Claridges’ bridal suite! But pregnant she became, as she had intended. (The nerve of it, reader: booking the bridal suite! Well, you have to hand it to her, I suppose; such chutzpah deserves some success.) Her plan, of course, was not only to have Clifford’s baby, which she wanted because she loved him—yes, well and truly loved him; the wicked as well as the good have the capacity to love—but to use her pregnancy as a lever to get him to marry her, once he had divorced Helen.

Now during those momentous hours at Claridges, when Barbara was conceived, Angie put into Clifford’s head the notion that Helen’s twin sons were not his, but Simon Cornbrook’s. Clifford had for four years been coping with boisterous twins, reared in the modern, permissive fashion, in a house in which he also entertained his fastidious and wealthy clients. He’d put up with it because Helen wanted him to, but once the thought had been put in his head, it was hard to get rid of: the twins, not his! Helen had been unfaithful once—she would again. And to get pregnant by her ex-husband Simon, because she was sorry for him and guilty about the way she had treated him, was just the kind of daft, hopeless thing Helen would do. And then foist them on him, Clifford—oh yes, it figured!

Clifford went right home from Claridges. He went, I may say, with a clear conscience. He did not
love
Angie, reader. He did not even like her, though something in him certainly responded to her, and so he did not register himself as having been unfaithful to Helen, no, not at all. He found his wife sitting over a lunchtime glass of wine with her ex-husband, Simon, pleasantly taken on the sunny patio, beneath brilliant hanging flower-baskets.

That did it.

“So,” he said to the pair of them, “this is what happens when I’m at work! What a fool I’ve been! You little slut,” (this to Helen) “foisting your bastards upon me!” And so on, including a lot of high-pitched nonsense about how Helen had not only asked Simon to Christmas dinner but how Simon had carved the turkey he, Clifford, had paid for. No use for Simon to point out that Helen had prevailed upon him to come to Christmas for little Edward’s sake (her son by Simon, properly, decently and lawfully conceived) and that Clifford had practically bullied him into carving. No! Or that now the purpose of their meeting was merely to discuss Edward’s schooling. No! No good for Helen to explain and deny and weep her innocence and love for Clifford. No!

And then Simon said what he had heard earlier from Angie’s lips. That Clifford had been having a long-running affair with Fanny so who was he to talk? And so indeed Clifford had been. That is to say, he hadn’t exactly registered it as an
affair
, or indeed a
relationship.
Fanny was just someone he made love to when he and she were late at the office, and couldn’t decide between a fake and a genuine master. Sex cleared the head. And if poor Fanny was hopelessly and permanently in love with him, Clifford, she certainly knew better these days than to say so. (Though perhaps, reader, she hated him in the kind of close, dependent way some women hate the men they think they love. Certainly Fanny longed to score Clifford’s broad fair back with her nails on those occasions, but of course she couldn’t. Married men must be left unmarked.)

“If I am,” said Clifford, “it is because my wife has driven me to it. Listen to her now—screaming and ranting.” And at that, Helen’s head cleared. She simply stopped weeping and declaring her innocence.

“It can only be your guilt,” she said to Clifford, “which makes you behave like this.” She was right, of course. “And what is more, the way you behave is unforgivable. I am going to divorce you for unreasonable behavior, and that is just.”

“Get out of my house, then,” said Clifford, quite cold all of a sudden, and hating her because now she had done the unforgivable and talked about something which really frightened him. Divorce!
And
in front of a witness too, which made it more real; the more so because that witness was Simon.

And do you know what Helen did? She found her courage, and turned upon Clifford and said—“No, you go!” And such was the force of her righteous anger that, in spite of himself, he did.
He
capitulated, reader.
He
left. How often unhappily married wives get the feeling the house is the husband’s, and the only way of parting is for her to leave everything she has—when actually of course it is
theirs.
If anyone has to go, perhaps it should be
him.
And if she says so, loudly and clearly enough, and if he is guilty enough, he will.

Clifford meant, of course, to go for only a week or so, to teach Helen a lesson. So she would realize how much she loved him. So she would beg him to return, apologizing for past misdeeds. So they would be happy once more, their love cleansed, richer, truer. So that he would never have to sleep with Fanny again, or so much as see Angie again—