The Hearts and Lives of Men (41 page)

“Tell you what,” said Helen, one momentous day, as Nell moved on to the eightieth rose, and scarcely two had been the same—she was now using as many as twenty different reds to a single rose, and experimenting with a kind of 3-D effect, so that the tiny lush petals seemed to burst from their center—“if you promise not to let it go to your head, we’ll try you out as a model.”

“Okay,” said Nell, trying not to look pleased.

“When will you be eighteen?”

“In June,” said Nell.

“I had a daughter called Nell,” said Helen.

“I didn’t know that,” said Nell.

“She kind of got lost along the way,” said Helen.

“I’m sorry,” said Nell. What else can one say? Helen didn’t go into the manner of her loss, and Nell didn’t ask.

“She would have been eighteen next Christmas. On Christmas Day.”

“I’m always sorry for people who’re born on Christmas Day,” said Nell. “Only one set of presents! I’m a midsummer baby myself. Do you really want me to be a model?”

“You have the face and figure for it.”

“It’s just that models are two a penny,” said Nell. “Anyone can be pretty. There’s no possible merit in it.” And Helen wondered, now who do I know who says that kind of thing? Her father, of course, but how was she to make the connection?

“I’d rather be a dress designer,” said Nell. “That takes real talent.”

“And time,” said Helen, “and experience, and training.”

Nell seemed to get the point. She smiled.

“I’ll be a model, if I can keep my hair like this,” said Nell. It was short, black, spiky and brushed straight up.

“It’s hardly House of Lally image,” said Helen. But she could see it might be easier to change the House of Lally image than Nell’s mind, and Nell won. Then the boys came in—Edward, Max and Marcus—and were introduced, but Nell was only one of the staff so they didn’t take much notice of her. They wanted their mother to come down to the kitchen and make supper, and, being her mother’s daughter, she went with them to do just that. Nell felt oddly lonely when they were all gone, as if an overhead light had been switched off and left her in the dark. She finished the rose, and later that evening phoned Mrs. Kildare, just to say she was well and working, and Mrs. Kildare wasn’t to worry, and love to Brenda, and, oh, yes, regards to Mr. Kildare. Then she went and signed up for A level evening classes in Art, History and French. She was back on course again.

N
OW, READER, SHALL WE
get back to Angie’s complexion? Remember how she had what the cosmetic surgeons call a facial peel and it went wrong? How the crevices and bumps were worse than before? She didn’t really want to sue the clinic: the publicity would be agony. But when in the course of their correspondence with her they suggested the trouble was unrelated to the peel and psychosomatic in origin, but that they would pay for a psychiatrist’s fees, she accepted. She went to Dr. Myling, of the new holistic school. She’d heard he was young and good-looking. He was.

“What do
you
think the matter is?” he asked.

“I’m unhappy,” she heard herself saying. She was amazed at herself.

“Why?” He had bright blue eyes. He could see into her soul just as Father McCrombie did, but he was kind.

“My husband doesn’t love me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m unlovable.” The words shocked her, but they were her own words.

“Go away and try to be lovable,” he said. “If your skin’s still bad in two weeks, we’ll try pills. But only then.”

Angie went away and tried to be lovable. She did this by calling Father McCrombie and saying she was selling the chapel and no longer needed his services. She was beginning to feel spooked at the whole thing. Sometimes, in the night, when Clifford was away—which was usually—she’d hear her father laughing.

“Selling the chapel might not be wise,” said Father McCrombie, lighting another black candle. “Begorah and it might not at all.” Father McCrombie was Edinburgh-born, as we know, but people liked the Irish brogue, and he’d cultivated it. Sometimes, he played not the devil’s disciple, but the lovable rogue; sometimes he even thought his good self had returned, and his soul was his own again.

“You can’t frighten me,” said Angie, though he did. So instead of having her social secretary simply call the real-estate agents and say “Sell!” Angie went around in person to their offices. She wanted to do it herself; she wanted to be courageous; she was not used to feeling fear. She wanted to get the better of it, to taste it properly before spitting it out. I think she was very brave. (You know my policy on speaking well of the living—never mind the dead.)

It was a wet day. You could hardly see for the rain. Angie stood at the junction of Primrose Hill Road and Regents Park Road, just about where Aleister Crowley, the Beast of 666 fame, used to live, and wondered which way to turn. Horns blared and lights blazed toward her. She could not make sense of them—noise and light seemed to leap together into the air—there was a second’s soaring silence, and then a thwack from above, which crushed light, life and soul out of her. Perhaps the lesson is that the bad should not attempt to be good. The effort will kill them.

FREAK ACCIDENT KILLS DRUG-CASE MILLIONAIRESS
said one paper, trying to hide its mirth. A gasoline truck, careening out of control down Primrose Hill, had struck the curb, overturned, sailed through the air and landed flat on Angie.
POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL CRUSHED AS ART-CASE HUSBAND STANDS TRIAL IN NEW YORK
said another.

“The world’s well rid of her,” said John Lally, in spite of the way that Ottoline’s had served him, and I am sorry to say there were few to disagree. Only little Barbara wept.

Angie, dear Angie, I don’t know what went wrong, what made you so cross and sad, able to bring pleasure to so few. Should we blame your mother, inasmuch as she never loved you? Well, Clifford’s mother, Cynthia, didn’t love him either, and granted, it didn’t do him much good, but it didn’t make him unlovable. (Well, look at Helen. Look at your author, who keeps excusing him. He at least has some insight into himself; and a kind of honesty in his selfishness, not to mention a capacity for change—perhaps the most important quality of all.) It is too easy to blame mothers for all the ills of the world. Everything would be okay, we tell ourselves, if only
mothers
did what they should—loved wholly, totally and completely, to the exclusion of all others. But mothers are people too. All they can do in the way of love is the best they can, and the child’s report of them always goes “could do better if tried.” Should one blame fathers? Angie’s father, we know, found her unlovable. Did that
make
her unlovable? I don’t think so. Helen’s father John Lally was pretty impossible, but Helen was never
nasty.
Feckless and irresponsible in youth, no doubt, but the opposite in her maturity.

Angie, I search for good things to say about you, and can find very little. Yet, wait. If it were not for Angie, Nell would not be alive. She would have been lost to the horrid snip, snip of Dr. Runcorn’s metal instruments. Angie’s motives were not good—but to do good for the wrong reason is better than not to do good at all. And now we have searched her past and found at least this one good thing, let us mark her memory RIP, Rest in Peace, and set about picking up the wreckage Angie strewed around her in her life, and piecing it together again as best we can.

We all live by myth, reader: if only by the myth of happiness around the corner. Well, why not? But how good we are at holding the myths of our society in one corner of our minds—say, that most people live in proper family units—father out to work, mother at home minding the children—while the evidence of our own eyes, our own lives, shows us how far this if from the truth. And how bad we are at facing truth. But we are stronger than we think. The myth might hurt, but the world won’t come to an end. The sun won’t go out. We are all one flesh, one family. We are the same person with a million million faces. We include in us Angie, and Mr. Blotton and even Father McCrombie. We must learn to incorporate them, include them in our vision of ourselves. We must not hiss the villain, but welcome him in. That way we make ourselves whole. Angie, friend, rest in peace.

Y
OU KNOW HOW IT
is, when nothing seems to happen for ages and then everything all at once? With Angie’s death it was as if a whole tangle of threads was suddenly pulled tight. Everything shifted, changed, interlocked. There was certainly no stopping the process, though how it was to go, of course, depended on the way the threads had been placed, with good intent or bad, over the past decade.

Now Father McCrombie, the ex-priest, in return for a bed to sleep on (a foam mattress in the toll-house), a bottle of brandy (or two) a night, a very small fee (Angie was as mean as only the born-rich can be—you know my views on that), had been in the habit not just of lighting black candles whenever he thought of it, but of conducting a rather formal weekly Black Mass in the Satan’s Enterprise Chapel (which Angie didn’t know about. She’d only have laughed, mind you, half believing, half not-believing, in all such nonsense). Father McCrombie, if the truth be known, these days only half-believed as well, but took good money from those who did turn up and took it seriously. Nevertheless, ill wishes do no one any good, for when Angie phoned out of the blue to say she was selling the chapel and thus depriving him of his income, and Father McCrombie had lit his own big black candle and called down the wrath of the Devil, had not Angie on that instant been squashed flat, like a swatted mosquito? It was enough to frighten a saint, let alone a villainous ex-priest, defrocked and excommunicated, his mind blasted by psychedelic drugs.

Father McCrombie decided enough was enough, blew out his candles, said a quick and partly sincere Hail Mary, bade adieu forever to the ghost of Christabel, closed the chapel, and lumbered out into the world to make his fortune some other way.

Father McCrombie’s friends being who they were, and his connections with Angie what they were, it was not surprising that in his search for semi-honest employment he presently met up with Erich Blotton, who now went by the innocent name of Peter Piper of Piper Art Security Limited, a firm which supervised the transport from place to place of national art treasures, protecting and insuring them against theft, flood, fire, ransom, switching and general deception.

Remember Erich Blotton? The chain-smoking, child-snatching lawyer who had escaped with Nell when ZOE 05 crashed? Erich Blotton, on the strength of one short interview with Clifford, years back in the days of his child-snatching, had decided to go into Art. There, obviously, money, power and prestige lay—not to mention rich pickings.

Piper Art Security worked out of rather small, smoky offices in the Burlington Arcade, above a knitwear boutique. The boutique’s owner complained that the stench of cigarette smoke got into her stock, but what could she do? Peter Piper would certainly not stop smoking. It was, he told her, and with some truth, the only pleasure he had in life.

Erich Blotton was not a happy man. He missed his wife, who had given two million pounds away to children’s charities, and died the week before he’d judged it safe to slip back into the country and bring her out with him.

“You’d better come back soon, Erich,” she’d once told him on the phone. “Because until you do, I’m going to spend, spend, spend!” Men had come around looking for him, she said. Big, dangerous, black men. Such men could only be, he supposed, hit men, out to get him. Too many people altogether had been looking for him. Bereft and angry parents, he’d come to realize, make bad enemies—more dangerous than police, or criminal associates. So he missed his wife’s funeral, changed his name, his profession, and his way of life. He thought he was safe. But it was all such hard graft; he lamented the past.

Father McCrombie went to see Peter Piper and said, “Begorah, how would it look if a man like me came in with a man like you? I have my talents, you have yours.”

Peter Piper was never a big man. He smoked a hundred cigarettes a day and coughed, wheezed and trembled as a result. He had bad circulation in his right leg. Canvases are large and heavy. So was Father McCrombie, and frightening too, with his red hair, red beard and strange rolling red eyes. A good man to have around. Or so it seemed to Peter Piper. Perhaps Father McCrombie had hypnotic eyes?

“Why not?” said Peter Piper.

They talked briefly of Angie Wellbrook’s death. Much of Piper Art Security’s business was with Ottoline’s.

“Tragic!” said Peter Piper. “Poor woman!”

“Poor woman,” said Father McCrombie, and crossed himself.

May God have mercy on her soul.

No thunderbolts descended, but should have.

“Of course,” said Peter Piper, “her death is a great misfortune to Piper Art Security,” and Father McCrombie felt it was his bounden duty to help the new firm out in whatever way he could. And there, for the time being, we leave the two of them, plotting away, but at least without the help, for once, of disagreeable cosmic forces, though Father McCrombie sniffed the air, and felt expectation in it—the expectation of excitement and evil. Something of the atmosphere of the Satan Chapel seemed to travel with him; there was not much he could do about it.

Peter Piper said, “Can you smell something?” and sniffed as well, but he smoked so much it was hard for him to differentiate between one smell and another, hamburger onion from the spoor of the Devil, so he lit another cigarette and gave up, and downstairs Pat Christie of the Knitwear Boutique picked up the phone and made arrangements to break the lease. Somehow the girl didn’t like the place anymore.

C
LIFFORD WAS IN THE
dock of a criminal court in New York at the very moment that Father McCrombie blew out his final candle. McLinsky had taken the unusual step of going to the police with an account of his dealings with Leonardo’s (New York). Now perhaps the general feeling was that the English were muscling in too hard and too fast on the Big Apple’s art scene, and had to be taught a lesson or two—perhaps McLinsky’s outrage was genuine and his Puritan stock simply showing—but there Clifford was, actually indicted, and a charge of deception and fraud to be faced.