The Hearts and Lives of Men (4 page)

W
HEN THE FIRST MORNING CAME
for Helen and it was the sun’s turn to shine down upon the rumpled bed, not the moon’s, and Clifford had to go to work, there seemed little point in her getting out of bed at all, except to make a cup of coffee for them both, and have a bath, and make a phone call or two, because that was so obviously where she would be the following night. In Clifford’s bed.

On that first morning, it actually hurt Clifford to leave Helen. He gasped when he got out into the cold clean morning air, and not from the shock to his lungs, as from the awareness that he could no longer touch, feel, incorporate Helen’s body. He felt actual pain in his heart, but in such a good cause that he ignored it and went whistling and smiling into the office. Secretaries looked at one another. It did not seem likely that this was Angie’s doing. Clifford called Helen the first moment he could.

“How are you doing?” he asked. “What are you doing? Exactly.”

“Well,” she said. “I’m up and I’ve washed my dress and hung it in the window to dry and I’ve fed the cat. I think she may have fleas: the poor little thing’s scratching. I’ll get her a flea collar, shall I?”

“Do what you want,” he said, “it’s okay by me,” and was astounded to hear himself saying so. But it was true. Helen had somehow ironed out of him, at least for the time being, his capacity for being critical. He trusted his body, his life, his cat to her, after fourteen hours of knowing her. He hoped it would not affect his work. He turned his attention to the newspapers. Leonardo’s embryonic PR department—that is to say, Clifford in a few snatched hours a week—had clearly done spectacularly well. The party, the exhibition, took up many column inches of the inside pages.

Any minute now the unprecedented sight (unprecedented because this was the sixties, remember) of long lines forming outside Leonardo’s, right down Piccadilly, would occur. The punters (forgive me, the public) would be waiting for admission to Hieronymus Bosch, to see what Clifford had described as that great man’s vision of the future. The fact that Bosch’s phantasmagoric vision was of his own present, and not the world’s future, and Clifford knew it gave him a few qualms, but not many. Better the public found pictures interesting; better the broad, bright, attractive strokes of semi-fantasy, than the boring, painstaking, pointillism of actuality. To bend the truth just a little, for the sake of Art, cannot be bad.

On the first night, reader, Nell was conceived. Or so Helen swears. She says she felt it. It was as if, she said, the sun and moon suddenly united, inside her.

On the second night Clifford and Helen managed to stop embracing for long enough to give each other their life histories. Clifford spoke, as he had never spoken to anyone, of the trauma of his childhood, when he was sent to the country, to be out of the way of Hitler’s bombs, and was lost, alone and frightened, while his parents went about the world’s business, rather than his. Helen took Clifford on a quick and not quite accurate—being abbreviated—tour of her former loves. He stopped her confessions with kisses, rather quickly.

“Your life starts now,” he said. “Nothing that has happened before counts. Only this.”

And that, reader, was how Clifford and Helen met, and how Nell was conceived in a great flurry of white-hot and enduring passion. I draw back now from saying
love
—it was too wild an emotion for that, a far too sensitive barometer whose needle swung from Much Rain to Set Fair, and hardly ever stayed nicely vertical on Change, in the middle, as somehow a barometer ought to do—guarding its options. But there again, love is the only word we have. It will have to do.

On the third night there was a great banging on the apartment door; and a kick drove through and splintered the wood, and the lock burst open and there was John Lally hoping to catch his daughter Helen and his mentor and enemy Clifford Wexford, in, as they say,
flagrante delicto.

C
LIFFORD AND HELEN WERE,
fortunately, innocently asleep when John Lally burst in upon them. They lay exhausted on a rumpled bed, a hairy limb here, a smooth one there, her head on his chest, hardly comfortable to outside eyes; to lovers, real lovers, that is, perfectly comfortable, just not to those who know they’ll presently have to get up and steal away before the embarrassing time for breakfast arrives. Real lovers sleep soundly, knowing that when they wake nothing has to end, but will simply continue. The conviction suffuses their sleep: they smile as they slumber. The sound of splintering wood entered their dreams and was converted there, in Helen’s case, to the sound of a fluffy chicken emerging from an egg she had in the palm of her hand, and in Clifford’s case, to the sound of his skis as he swept masterfully and unerringly down snowy mountain slopes. The sight of his sleeping smiling daughter, his smiling sleeping enemy, who had stolen his last treasure, inflamed John Lally the more. He roared. Clifford frowned in his sleep; chasms yawned beneath him. Helen stirred and woke. The cozy cheeping of the newborn chick had turned into a wail. She sat up. She saw her father and pulled the sheet above her breasts. Bruise marks had yet to develop.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked. It was the question of a born conspirator who feels no guilt but whose plans have gone awry. He did not deign to reply, but I will tell you.

By one of those mischances which dog the fates of lovers, Clifford’s departure with Helen from the Bosch party had been the subject of a small item in a gossip column, and this had been taken up by one Harry Stephens, a habitué of the Appletree Pub in Lower Appleby. Now Harry had a cousin in Sotheby’s, where Helen had her part-time job, restoring earthenware, and had inquired further, and thus word had got back to deepest Gloucestershire that Helen Lally had vanished into Clifford Wexford’s house, and had not emerged since.

“Quite a daughter you’ve got there!” said Harry Stephens. John Lally was not popular in the neighborhood. Lower Appleby forgave his eccentricity, his debts, his neglected orchard, but not the way he, a foreigner, drank cider in the pub and not shots, and the way he treated his wife. Otherwise the subject of his daughter would not have been brought up, but tactfully ignored. As it was, John Lally finished up his cider, got in his battered Volkswagen—its top speed 25 mph—and made the journey to London through the night, through the dawn, not so much to rescue his daughter but to fix Clifford Wexford once and for all as the villain he was.

“Whore!” cried John Lally now, tugging Helen out of bed, because she was nearest.

“Oh really, Dad,” she said, slipping out from under his grasp, on her feet, readjusting her slip, and then to the waking, startled Clifford, “I’m sorry, it’s my father.” She had caught her mother’s habit of apologizing. She was never to lose it. Except that where her mother used the phrase pathetically, in the hope of diverting torrents of abuse, Helen used it as a kind of bored reproach to the fates, with a wry lift of a delicate eyebrow. Clifford sat up, startled.

John Lally looked around the bedroom walls, at the paintings which were the sum of five years or so of his life and work: a rotten fig on a branch, a rainbow distorted by a toad, a line of washing in a cavern’s mouth—I know they sound dreadful but, reader, they are not; they hang today in the world’s most distinguished galleries, and no one blanches when they pass: the colors are so strong, sharp and layered, it is as if one reality is pasted on top of a whole series of others—and then at his daughter, who was half-laughing, half-crying, embarrassed, excited and angry all at once: and at Clifford’s strong, naked body with the fuzz of fair, almost white hair along his bronzed arms and legs (Clifford and Angie had recently gone on vacation to Brazil where they had stayed at an art-collector’s palace, a place of marble floors and gold-leafed taps and so on, and Tintorettos on the walls, and hot, hot bleaching sun) and back to the rumpled, heated bed.

It was, no doubt, purity of heart and sheer self-righteousness which gave John Lally the strength of ten. He lifted Clifford Wexford, young puppy or hope of the Art World, depending on how you saw it, by a naked arm and a bare leg, and effortlessly, as if the younger man were a rag doll, raised him on high. Helen shrieked. The doll came to life just in time and with his free leg directed a sharp kick at John Lally’s crotch, getting him just where it hurt most. John Lally shrieked in his turn; the cat—who had spent a warm but restless night on the end of the foam rubber bed—finally gave up and stalked off just in time, for Clifford Wexford came tumbling down just where a second ago he had been curled, as John Lally simply let him go. Clifford was no sooner down than up, hooked a young and flexible foot behind John Lally’s stiff ankle and tugged it so that his beloved’s father fell face down on the floor, hitting his face and making his nose bleed. Clifford, broad-shouldered, sinewy, young, stood proud and naked over his defeated foe. (He was no more ashamed of his body than Helen was. Though just as Helen felt more comfortable clothed in front of her father, no doubt, had his mother been present, Clifford would quickly have pulled on at least his underpants.)

“Your father really is a bore,” said Clifford to Helen. John Lally lay face down on the floor, his eyes open and burning into the Kelim rug. It was striped in dull oranges and muted reds; colors and pattern which were later to emerge in one of his most well-known paintings—
The Scourging of St. Ida.
(Painters, like writers, have the knack of putting the most distressing and extreme events to artistic good purpose.) In these days, rugs such as the one then flung so casually over Clifford’s polished wood attic floor are rare and cost thousands of pounds at Liberty’s. Then they could be bought for a fiver or so at any junk shop. Clifford, of course, with his knowing eye to the future, had already managed to pick up a dozen or so very fine specimens.

John Lally was not sure which was worse: the pain or the humiliation. As the former decreased, the latter intensified. His eyes watered, his nose bled, his groin ached. His fingers tingled. He had been painting obsessively for twenty-eight years, and so far as he could see to no commercial or practical purpose. Canvases stacked in his studio, his garage. The only person who seemed to understand their merit was Clifford Wexford. Worse, and the artist had to acknowledge it, this blond young puppy of a man, with his meretricious view of the world, his easy way with women, money, society, knew exactly how to foster his talent by an encouraging word here, a moral slap there: a lift of an eyebrow as, on his periodic visits, he leafed through the stacked canvases in the Lally attic, garage, garden shed. “Yes, that’s interesting. No, no, good try but didn’t quite come off, did it—ah, yes—” and young Wexford would pick out the very ones the painter knew to be his best work and so most expected the world to disdain, and by now hoped it would disdain, the better for him to disdain and despise the world—and took them. And a fiver or so would change hands—just enough to replace paints and brushes, though hardly enough to restock the kitchen cupboard, but that was Evelyn’s problem—and they’d be whisked away and a check from Leonardo’s would come through the mail slot every now and then, unexpected and unasked for. John Lally was torn, he was in conflict: he raged, he burned, he bled: so many passions, thought John Lally, face down, bleeding and weeping into the Kelim rug, might do me some real physical damage—that is to say, paralyze my painting hand. He calmed himself. He stopped writhing and groaning and lay still.

“Now that you’ve stopped making a fool of yourself,” said Clifford, “you’d better get up and get out before I lose my temper and kick you to death.”

John Lally continued to lie still. Clifford stirred his prostrate body with a casual foot.

“Don’t,” said Helen.

“I’ll do what I want,” said Clifford. “Look what he’s done to my door!” And he drew back his foot as if to deliver a hefty kick. He was angry, and not just because of his splintered wood, or having his privacy thus invaded, or Helen insulted, but because he realized at that moment that he actually envied and was jealous of John Lally, who could paint like an angel. And that to paint like an angel was the only thing in the world Clifford Wexford wanted. And because Clifford couldn’t, everything else seemed unimportant—money, ambition, the quest for status—mere substitutes, second best. He wanted to kick John Lally to death and that was the truth of it.

“Please don’t,” said Helen. “He’s a bit mad. He can’t help himself.”

John Lally looked up at his daughter and decided he didn’t like her one bit. She was a patronizing bitch, spoiled by Evelyn, ruined by the world; she was shoddy goods, untalented, spoiled. He clambered to his feet.

“Little bitch,” he said, “as if I cared whose bed you were in.” He was up just in time. Clifford delivered the kick and missed.

“Do what you want,” John Lally said to Helen. “Just don’t ever come near me or your mother again.”

And that, reader, was how Helen and Clifford met and how Helen gave up her family on Clifford’s account.

Helen did not doubt but that presently she and Clifford would marry. They were made for each other. They were two halves of the one whole. They could tell, if only from the way their limbs seemed to fuse together, as if finding at last their natural home. Well, that’s how love at first sight takes people. For good or bad, that’s that.

C
LIFFORD WAS PROUD AND
pleased to have discovered Helen just as she was satisfied and gratified to have found him. He looked back with amazement at his life pre-Helen: the casual sexual encounters, his general don’t call-me, I’ll call-you amorous behavior (and of course he seldom did, finding his attention and interest not fully engaged), the more decorous but still abortive marital skirmishing with a long list of more-or-less suitable girls, the frequent and ultimately tedious outings with the wrong person to the right restaurants and clubs. How had he put up with it? Why? I am sorry to say that Clifford, looking back, did not consider how many women he had wounded emotionally or socially, or both; he recalled only his own desolation and boredom.