The Hearts and Lives of Men (36 page)

T
HAT WAS THE YEAR
Nell, settled happily enough with the Kildares at the Border Kennels, took her O levels. Art, History, Geography, English, Math, General Science, Religious Knowledge, Needlework, Rural Studies, French. She was good at everything except Math, and particularly good at French. “You speak it almost like a native!” remarked her teacher. You and I, faithful reader, know the reason for that, even though Nell herself had forgotten. These days she seldom thinks back to the days before her arrival in Ruellyn, being at an age when she liked to live in the present, and let the past and future look after themselves.

She was interested in a boy called Dai Evans, who was too awed by her interest to do much about it. She was altogether too stunning for any ordinary classroom, what with her thick curly blonde hair (that early head-shaving in the Children’s Home must have done it a lot of good, or so my hairdresser says), straight nose, full lips, quick bright eyes and slow, lovely, female smile.

And what of her half-brother Edward, and her two full brothers, Max and Marcus? Reader, who was it who said that the children of lovers are orphans? Helen, deprived once again, by fortune and Angie, of Clifford, her one undying, permanent love, turned her attention toward her children and they were the better for it. Edward was twelve by now, and the twins Max and Marcus were eight. Three boys! And she had a half-sister too; Clifford and Angie’s daughter, Barbara. On the day of Barbara’s birth, Helen had thought she’d actually die from pain, grief and jealousy, so bad the feelings had been. Now no one in the world should hate a baby, let alone so docile a one as Barbara, and Helen knew it, but she did. She couldn’t help it. The baby had stolen Clifford from her, and left her and her children desolate. She tried to explain this to Marjorie.

“I blame the baby,” said Helen, “for everything that’s happened.”

“It’s hardly reasonable,” said Marjorie, the most reasonable of all people. Her baby was called Julian; another boy for the family. Helen’s little half-brother, Nell’s uncle. Fancy!

“And why should she have a girl?” demanded Helen. “It isn’t fair. The devil’s on her side.”

“But you had a girl,” said Marjorie. “You had Nell.”

For a moment Helen hated her stepmother for daring to mention her child, but only for a moment.

“The anger inside me is so mixed up,” she said presently, “I hardly know where to put it.” She’d enrolled again at the Royal College; she was taking a refresher course in fashion and fabric design. It made her feel better on one day, worse on another, as if a whole chunk of life had been wasted. Someone had to be to blame.

That evening she took out the folder in which she kept the yellowy and tattered photographs of Nell’s infancy and early childhood, and looked and stared, and the feeling came to her once again, “Nell
isn’t
dead. She isn’t. She’s just as alive as Barbara is.” Helen then remembered Arthur Hockney. She wondered what had become of him. She found his work number in an old diary, and called him. They said he’d left. He was some kind of community worker now; he ran a center for underprivileged kids in Harlem. But they gave her his number.

By the way, reader, Nell failed her Math O Level. I think she did it on purpose, for her best friend Brenda’s sake. Brenda failed the lot. At any rate, on the day of the exam Nell quite deliberately didn’t wear her teddy bear on the silver chain, the old tin thing with the jewel inside, which she always wore for luck.

T
HE FACT WAS, HELEN
had changed. Remember, she had married young; she’d had very little time to develop her own nature, or discover her likes and dislikes. She’d grown up with a willful and difficult father and a put-upon mother, and had learned early the childish and painful art of conciliation; how to survive as a small buffer state between two large warring ones, forever keeping the peace at her own expense. Then, married to Clifford, her opinions, perforce, had been his; he’d turned her from an artless (more or less) girl into a cool and knowledgeable woman who could read a wine list and tell a real Jacobean chest from a fake without even trying, but had no choice but to like what he liked, despise what he despised. Then when Simon took Clifford’s place in the marital bed, she’d adopted her new husband’s political views, his kindly, worldly, international cynicism. It is women’s capacity thus to learn to keep the domestic peace simply by
agreeing
—but it does them no good in the end of course. They go to sleep confused, and wake up confused, and become depressed.

But now when the three boys asked her questions Helen would be obliged to give answers which were not John Lally’s, nor Clifford Wexford’s, nor Simon Cornbrook’s, but her own, and very interesting she found them to be, too; almost, but never quite, making up for grief, loss and loneliness. Clifford (or was it Angie’s doing? Clifford had met his match in Angie!) would now only talk to Helen through solicitors and made her argue and beg for every grudging maintenance check. It was humiliating. But she could see her own fault in it. She’d had talents, and failed to develop them. She’d handed the responsibility for her own well-being over to others, and then complained about it. She’d been a wife, a mistress, a mother, and thought that was enough. But she had not even been a good mother—had she not lost Nell? she had not been a good wife—had she not lost her husband? All she was good at, all she’d been trained for—and she could see it now, deprived as she was of status, invitations and fashionable friends, all now turning out to exist only by courtesy of her marriage to Clifford—was asking for money, and she wasn’t even very good at that.

Well, now she was determined to be free of Clifford. She’d taken a refresher course. Now she looked up old acquaintances; she borrowed money on the strength of the one early John Lally she owned, a sketch of a drowned cat given to her on her eighteenth birthday—

“Looks like your mother in from shopping, on a wet day,” he’d said, joking (Ha! ha!) on that occasion. Helen had kept the drawing in the back of a drawer ever since, and hated it. But sentiment doesn’t pay mortgages, or start businesses. She’d taken out the drawing, gone with it to the bank, left it as security. And here she was, a bright new designer label on the London fashion scene: House of Lally. Her father was furious. She was bringing the family name into disrepute. Helen just laughed. Whenever had her father not been furious? And besides, his fury had somehow lost its bite. He could be seen, any day at Applecore Cottage, actually feeding the new baby Julian with a bottle. Marjorie had trouble breast-feeding—or so she said. It was Helen’s belief it was a put-up job, to get John Lally close to his new son. Which he was.

Simon wanted to remarry Helen, of course. She laughed and said, “Enough of that!” Some knots, she could tell, simply needed untying, not further complicating. And, reader, interestingly, the very style of Helen’s beauty changed, as did her life. She no longer seemed fragile and just a little mournful—now she gleamed with energy. Clifford, seeing his former wife one day on a television program, was quite put out. What had happened to her? Why was she not pining away for loss of him? Angie said the change was skin-deep, and that underneath the new gloss Helen was the same helpless, hopeless, drifting, stone-around-the-neck, frame-maker’s daughter she’d always been, and switched the program off.

It flattered Clifford to agree with Angie, but when the next check he sent Helen (three weeks late, of course) was returned, he did wonder. He almost thought he would visit her, but he could see that to put in an appearance now could only confuse the twins, since he so resolutely denied his paternity. So he did nothing. Only now, once again, Helen entered his dreams, and sometimes little Nell too, as she’d been when he last saw her. Where Angie couldn’t follow, there he and his true wife and his lost daughter went.

T
HIS WAS THE STATE
of affairs when Helen contacted Arthur Hockney once again. He came visiting with Sarah, now his wife, and the dog Kim, now an elegant, gentle beast who could safely enter the most cluttered and expensive drawing-room in the land. Arthur came reluctantly. He remembered well the pain Helen had inflicted the night he had baby-sat and she had not come home. Why should he revive all that again? But, seeing her, he realized two things: both that she had changed and that he was no longer in love with her. He loved Sarah. Sarah was not second-best at all. It was a wonderful revelation.

“I can’t put Nell’s ghost to rest,” said Helen. “And that’s the truth of it. If ghost it be, and not the real, live, living Nell. Arthur, please try!”

“I am no longer an investigator,” he pointed out. “I’m here for a conference on race relations.” He too had been back to college, he had completed the law course he long ago had walked out of.

But he did try. He called at Mrs. Blotton’s little terraced house and found her gone, and in the window a cardboard card announcing the residence of a Mrs. A. Haskins, Clairvoyant. Mrs. Haskins was fifty and fleshy, with loose jowls, a deep voice and large, tired, beautiful eyes. Mrs. Blotton had gone, she said, where Arthur couldn’t follow her.

“Where’s that?”

“The Other Side of Death,” said Mrs. Haskins. “Into the Light of the Hereafter.” The poor woman, a nonsmoker herself, had died of lung cancer, the result of passive smoking. “Inhaling the smoke from her husband’s cigarettes, year after year.

“I’m sorry,” said Arthur.

“Death is a cause for rejoicing, not weeping,” said Mrs. Haskins, and offered to tell Arthur’s fortune. Arthur accepted. He did not believe, or quite not believe, in clairvoyance. He was aware that sometimes he seemed to know more than could rationally be explained; and if
he
did, why not others? It is always tempting to find out what’s going to happen next.

Mrs. Haskins took his black, heavy hands and stared a little, and then pushed them away. “You’d do better telling it for yourself,” she said, and he understood her meaning, or half understood it. A tough black lawyer, ex-detective from New York, would rather believe in his own professionalism, any day, than in any convenient capacity for seeing through brick walls! He prepared to take his leave.

“She’ll find her own way home,” Mrs. Haskins remarked, out of the blue, as she walked flat-footed with him to the door. Her thick pale tights were laddered and the varicose veins showed through like knotted ropes but her eyes were bright.

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“The one you’re looking for. The lost child. She’s a powerful one, all right. An old soul. One of the greats.” And that was all Mary Haskins would say. More than enough, the superstitious amongst us might think!

Arthur went back to Helen and told her Nell’s trail was finally cold; that she must live in the present, not the past. He was glad to be rid of the role of detective. The work had been upsetting. It brought him too closely into contact with things which were better brushed past, not lingered with. He too feared for his soul; he wanted to live in the here and now, not forever on the brink of the past, of the present, sensing too much, knowing too little.

“How’ve you’ve changed,” said Helen. She wasn’t quite sure how, or why. But she knew she felt easier in his company. She liked Sarah. She was glad he was happy.

“It’s the baby’s doing,” said Sarah. “He’s settled down.” And though it’s true babies affect their fathers, almost as much as their mothers, with the desire for peace, and a certain future, I think myself it was Arthur’s coming to terms with his own conscience, one day in Mrs. Blotton’s house, that had made the difference. Mrs. Blotton, in spite of herself, did much good in her lifetime, and deserves to be remembered for it. May she rest in peace.

M
R. AND MRS. KILDARE
went away for the month of August, the year Nell took her O levels. They went to Greece. They left Nell and Brenda behind, in charge of the kennels. Summer is a busy time in such places. Well, you know how it is, people want to go abroad and can’t take their dogs with them; or at any rate, if they do, can’t bring them back into the country freely for fear of rabies. Moreover the Kildares had just opened authorized quarantine kennels—here they could take a dozen dogs, and keep them isolated for the required eight months. It meant a great deal of extra work—if also money—as the animals had to be not just exercised and fed, but talked to and cheered up, or else they lapsed into apathy, and either went off their food and grew thin, or became sluggish, fat and mournful—and then there would be uproar from the punters. One way or another Mr. and Mrs. Kildare were glad to get away.

Nell and Brenda were not glad to be left, of course. Brenda had never been abroad in her life, and wanted to very much, and though we know Nell has, she has no memory of it. Never can there have been a kennel maid like Nell, at sixteen! Brenda was good-looking enough—though suffering rather from acne around her chin—but by comparison with Nell she looked positively plain. She was dumpy, that was the trouble; her eyes were small and her cheeks plump. How unfair life is!

“Do you think they can be trusted?” asked Mrs. Kildare.

“Of course they can,” said Mr. Kildare, thinking of hot sands and blue skies and no dogs.

The Kildares loved dogs more than people, and often said so, which, for some reason beyond her parents’ comprehension, would upset Brenda and bring her out in spots. At the same time, they weren’t averse to leaving their charges whenever they could. They’d been away at Easter too, when the girls were studying for exams. This may have been why Brenda managed to fail so many.

“Supposing something goes wrong,” said Mrs. Kildare. But Mr. Kildare thought to himself something was more likely to go wrong if they stayed home. He found it difficult not to stare at Nell, he wanted just to touch her, to get her to smile at him in a different way than she smiled at the rest of the world. Perhaps when he came back he’d feel differently. He hoped so. He didn’t admire himself. Well, he was forty-five. She was sixteen. A twenty-nine-year gap. Mind you, he had heard of greater. She wasn’t a born animal-handler, as his wife was, and Brenda too, but she was good enough. Perhaps he and she could start again together—she was only a waif and stray, when it came to it. She had no background. She would be grateful—“A penny for your thoughts,” said Mrs. Kildare, and Mr. Kildare was ashamed of them. But how can a man not think what he thinks.