The Hearts and Lives of Men (5 page)

And as for Helen, it was as if until now her life had been lived in shadow. Ah, but now! An unthought-of sun illuminated her days, and sent its warm residual glow through her nights. Her eyes shone; how easily her color came and went: she shook her head and her brown curls tossed about, as if even they were suffused with extra life. Just sometimes, she went to her tiny workshop at Sotheby’s, returning always not to her own little flat but to Clifford’s home and bed. She was paid by the hour—poorly, but the very casualness of the job suited her. She sang as she worked; her specialty was the piecing together of early earthenware (most restorers prefer the hard sharp edges and colors of ceramics. Helen loved the challenging, tricky, melting, flaky softness of early country jugs and mugs). She forgot friends and suitors; she left her roommate to pay the rent, and answer questions. She could not believe anymore that money mattered, or reputation, or the continuing goodwill of friends. She was in love. They were in love. Clifford was rich. Clifford would protect her. Bother the detail. Bother her father’s rage, her mother’s distress, her employers’ raised eyebrows as they totted up the hours she worked each week, and reckoned again the cost of the workshop space she took up. Clifford was all the family, the friends, she would ever need: he was the roof over her head, the cloth on her back, the sun in her sky.

Well, love can’t heal everything, can it. Sometimes I see it just as a kind of ointment, which people apply to their wounded egos. True healing has to come from within: a matter of a patient, slow plodding toward self-understanding, of gritting the teeth and enduring boredom and irritation, and smiling at milkmen and paying the rent, and wiping the children’s faces and not showing hurt, or exhaustion, or impatience—but Helen would have none of that, reader. She was young, she was beautiful, the world was her oyster. She knew it. She let love sweep her away and swallow her up—and all she did was raise her pretty white hands to heaven and say, “I can’t help it! This thing is greater than me!”

C
LIFFORD ARRIVED AT LEONARDO’S
on the morning of his encounter with John Lally with a bruised fist and in a bad temper.

His first appointment that day was with Harry Blast, the ungallant young TV interviewer who had managed not to escort Angie Wellbrook home on the night of the Bosch party. It was Harry’s first interview: it was to be inserted as an end piece to a program called “Monitor.” Harry was nervous and vulnerable. Clifford knew it.

The interview was set up in Sir Larry Patt’s grand paneled office overlooking the Thames. The BBC’s cameras were large and unwieldy. The floor was a network of cables. Sir Larry Patt was as nervous as Harry Blast. Clifford was too warm from Helen’s bed and his victory over the poor ruined hulk of an artist to be in the least unsure of himself. It was his first time before the cameras too but no one would ever have known it. It was, in fact, this particular interview which set Clifford on his own particular spot-lit path to art stardom. Clifford Wexford says this—Wex says that—quote the great C.W. and you’d be in business; if you were brave enough to ask him, that is; risk the slow put-down or the fast riposte, you could never be sure which: the quick glance of the bright blue eyes which would sum you up as okay and worth the hearing out, or dismiss you as one of the world’s little people. He had the kind of even features that television cameras love—and a clear quick intelligence which cut through cant and pretension, while yet not being free of it himself—on the contrary.

“Well, now,” said Harry Blast, the interviewer, bluntly, when the cameras had stopped admiring the Jacobean paneling, County Hall across the river, and the Gainsborough on the wall above the wide Georgian fireplace, and got down to business as he’d clearly prepared his question beforehand. “It has been suggested that perhaps the Arts Council—by which of course we mean the unfortunate taxpayer—has underwritten rather too high a proportion of the cost of the Bosch exhibition, and Leonardo’s claimed rather too much of the profit. What do you say to this, Mr. Wexford?”

“You mean
you
are suggesting it,” said Clifford. “Why don’t you just come out with it? Leonardo’s is milking the taxpayer …”

“Well—” said Harry Blast, flustered, his large nose growing pinker and pinker as it did when he was stressed. A good thing color television was yet to come, or his career might never have gotten underway. Stress is part of the media man’s life!

“And how are we to judge these things?” asked Clifford. “How are we to quantify, when it comes to matters of art, where profit lies? If Leonardo’s brings art to an art-starved public, and governmental bodies have failed to do so, then surely we deserve, if not exactly reward, just a little encouragement? You saw those queues down the street. I hope you bothered to point your cameras. I tell you, the people of this country have been starved of beauty for too long.”

And of course it just so happened that Harry Blast had neglected to film the queues. Clifford knew it.

“As to the exact proportion of the Arts Council grant to Leonardo’s funding, I think it’s a matter of matching funds. Isn’t that so, Sir Larry? He’s king of finances around here.”

And the cameras turned, at Clifford’s behest, to Sir Larry Patt, who of course didn’t know without looking it up, and mumbled words to this effect instead of proclaiming ignorance loudly and clearly to the world, as he would have been better advised to do. Sir Larry had no television presence at all: his face was too old and the marks of self-indulgence written too large upon it, in the form of sloppy jowls and self-satisfied mouth. He, too, had had an upsetting morning. He had been woken by an early morning call from Madame Bouser in Amsterdam.

“What kind of country is England?” she had demanded. “Are you so lost to civilization that a husband can be seduced under his wife’s very nose, and the husband of the woman who does it take no notice at all?”

“Madam,” said Sir Larry Patt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Nor had he. Finding his wife unattractive, it did not occur to him that other men might be attracted to her. Sir Larry belonged to a class and generation which viewed women askance; he had married one as much like a boy as possible (which Clifford had once pointed out to Rowena, making her cry). He was not an unimaginative man—just one made uneasy by emotion, who reserved his rapture for art rather than love; for paintings, rather than sex. And this, in itself, was surely a reason for self-congratulation: coming as he did from a background which prided itself on its philistinism; surely he had shown self-determination enough. He knew he had good reason to be smug. The instrument had gone dead suddenly and fortunately—as if it had been wrested out of Madame Bouser’s hand. He was not surprised. She was hysterical. Women so often were. He went into Rowena’s bedroom and found her sleeping peacefully, in her flat-chested way, and did not disturb her in case she became the same. He did not feel at his best. The fact became obvious to Harry Blast that Sir Larry belonged to the past. He had to, since Clifford belonged to the future, and television believes in polarities. Good, bad, old, new, left, right, funny, tragic, Patt on the way out, Wexford on the way in. And so the interview was the beginning of Sir Larry Patt’s downfall; the top of a long gentle slope down, and Clifford it was who quite willfully, that day, nudged him on to it. Sir Larry didn’t even notice. Clifford looked into a future and saw that it contained the possibility of dynasty. To make Helen his Queen he would have to be King. That meant he must rule over Leonardo’s, and Leonardo’s itself would have to grow and change, become one of those intricate complexes of power of which the modern world was fast becoming composed. He would have to do it by stealth, by playing politics, by behaving as kings and emperors always had: by demanding loyalty, and extracting fealty, allowing no one too close to him, by playing one favorite off against another, by keeping to himself the power of life and death and using it (or hiring and firing, the modern equivalent), by giving unexpected favors, meting out unexpected punishments, by letting his smile mean munificence, his frown hardship. He would become Wexford of Leonardo’s. He, the ne’er-do-well, the anxious, striving, restless son of a powerful father, would cease to be an outsider, would cease to be the moon revolving around the sun, but become the sun itself. For Helen’s sake he would turn the world inside out.

He sighed and stretched; how powerful he felt! Harry Blast’s cameras caught the sigh and the stretch and made the still that made the program, and was every picture-editor’s favorite thereafter, whenever they ran a story on wheelings and dealings in the Art World. There was just something about it: some feeling, I daresay, of the Act of Accession—that moment which is supposed to be so important, when the Archbishop actually places the crown upon the new monarch’s head—that was caught by Harry Blast’s cameras, unawares.

A
ND WHILE CLIFFORD WEXFORD
considered his future, and regularized, professionalized, and indeed sanctified what had so far been only a vague ambition, the girl of his dreams, Helen Lally, sat with her mother and sipped herbal tea at Cranks, the new health-food restaurant in Carnaby Street. Cranks was the prototype of a million others which were, over the next twenty-five years, to spring up all over the world. Whole food and herbal tea = spiritual and physical health. It was a very new notion at the time and Evelyn sipped her comfrey tea with some suspicion. (Comfrey is now not taken internally, for fear it may be carcinogenic, but only used in external application, so her instinct may have been right.)

“It will comfort you, Mother,” said Helen, hopefully. Evelyn clearly needed comforting. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. She looked plain, desperate and old: not a good combination. On his return from 5 Coffee Place, John Lally had reaffirmed to his wife that her daughter Helen was no longer welcome in Applecore Cottage, that the only possible explanation for the girl’s behavior was that she was no child of his, and had locked himself in the garage. There within, presumably, he now painted furiously. Evelyn set food and drink on the windowsill from time to time; the food would be taken—the window raised quickly then banged shut—but the drink, rather pointedly, left. Homemade wine was stored in the garage, so supposedly this was all he required. Black rage seemed to seep out under the garage door. “It isn’t fair,” said Evelyn to her daughter, as if
she
were the child and not the mother. “It just isn’t fair!”

Nor of course was it. She who had done so much for her husband, dedicated her whole life to him, thus to be treated!

“I try not to let you know how upset I get,” she said, “but you’re a grown girl now, and I suppose this is life.”

“Only if you let it be,” said Helen, secure in the knowledge of her newfound love, and that she for one meant to live happily ever after.

“If only you’d been more tactful about it,” said her mother, as near a reproach as she had ever uttered. “You have no idea how to manage your father.”

“Well,” said Helen, “I’m sorry. I suppose it is all my fault. But he keeps shutting himself in. Usually it’s the attic, and now it’s the garage. I don’t know why you get so upset about it. It’s nothing unusual. If you didn’t get so upset, he might not do it.”

She was trying to be serious but only managed, to her mother, to sound frivolous. She couldn’t help it. She loved Clifford Wexford. So what if her father angered himself to death and her mother grieved herself to an untimely end; she, Helen, loved Clifford Wexford, and youth, energy, future, common sense, and good cheer were on her side, and that was that.

Evelyn presently composed herself and properly admired the unusual stripped-pine country-style of the restaurant, and agreed with her daughter that things had been going on like this for twenty-five years. She expected they’d go on like this for quite a while. Helen was quite right. There was no need to worry and all she had to do was pull herself together. “Good heavens,” said Evelyn, pulling herself together, “you hair
is
looking lovely. So curly!”

And Helen, who could afford to be kind, was, and did not instantly try to smooth her hair around her ears, but shook her head so it fluffed out just as her mother liked it. Helen liked to wear her hair straight, flat, silky and smooth long before such a thing was fashionable. Love seemed to be on Evelyn’s side in this respect at least, thickening and curling her daughter’s hair.

“I’m in love,” Helen said. “I expect that’s it.”

Evelyn looked at her, puzzled. How had life at Applecore Cottage created such naiveté?

“Well,” she said, “don’t rush into anything just because life at home was so horrible.”

“Oh Mum, it was never exactly horrible,” protested Helen, though sometimes it truly had been. Applecore Cottage was quaint and charming, but her father’s frequent black moods did indeed float like a noxious gas under doors and through cracks, no matter that he shut himself away, both for his family’s sake (to protect them from him) and for his (to protect him from their female philistinism and general treachery) and her mother’s eyes had been too often red-rimmed, thus somehow dimming the luster of the copper pans which hung so prettily in the kitchen, throwing back the light from latticed windows; at such times Helen had longed, longed just to get away. Yet at other times they’d been a close family, sharing thought, feeling, aspirations; the two women intensely loyal to John Lally’s genius, gladly putting up with hardship and penury on that account, understanding that the painter’s temperament was as difficult for him to endure as it was for them. But then Helen had gone—off to Art School, and a mysterious life in London, and Evelyn had to take the full undiluted force, not of her husband’s attention, for he gave her little, but of his circling, angry energy, and began to understand that though he would survive, and his paintings too, she, Evelyn, might very well not. She felt far older and more tired than she should. What was more, she understood only too well that if John Lally had to choose between his art and her, he would undoubtedly choose his art. If he loved her, she once told Helen in an uncharacteristic burst of anger, it was as a man with a wooden leg loved that leg. He couldn’t do without it, but wished he could.