The Hearts and Lives of Men (6 page)
Now she smiled sweetly at Helen, and patted her daughter’s small firm white hand with her large loose one and said, “It’s nice of you to say so.”
“You always did your best,” said Helen, and then, panicky—“Why are you talking as if we’re saying good-bye?”
“Because if you’re with Clifford Wexford,” said Evelyn, “it is, more or less.”
“He shouldn’t have burst in on us the way he did. I’m sorry Clifford hit him but he was provoked.”
“It all goes deeper than that,” said Evelyn.
“He’ll get over it,” said Helen.
“No,” said her mother. “You do have to choose.” It occurred to Helen then that with Clifford for a lover, what did she want with a father.
“Why don’t you just leave home, Mum,” she said, “and let Dad get on with his genius on his own? Don’t you see it’s absurd. Living with a man who locks himself in and has to have his food from a plate left on a garage windowsill.”
“But darling,” said Evelyn, “he’s
painting
!” And Helen knew it was no use, and, in any case, hardly wanted it to be. It’s one thing to suggest to your parents that they part—and many do—quite horrific if they actually act upon that suggestion.
“It’s probably best,” said Evelyn to her own daughter, “if you just stay out of the way for a while,” and Helen was more than ever glad she had Clifford, for a feeling of hurt and terror welled up inside her and had to be subdued. It looked for a moment as if her own mother was abandoning her. But of course that was nonsense. They shared a particularly novel whole-wheat-and-honey biscuit, which Evelyn quite liked, and shared the bill, and once outside, smiled and kissed and went their separate ways, Evelyn no longer with a child, Helen no longer with a mother.
“G
OOD LORD,” SAID CLIFFORD,
when Helen reported the conversation to him that night, “whatever you do, don’t encourage your mother to leave home!”
They were having supper in bed, trying not to get the black sheets sticky with taramosalata, whipped up by Clifford from cod’s roe, lemon juice and cream, and cheaper than buying it already made up. Not even love could induce Clifford to abandon his habits of economy—some called it parsimony but why not use the kinder word? Clifford insisted on living well, and also took pleasure in never spending a penny more than he had to in so doing.
“Why not, Clifford?”
Sometimes Clifford confused Helen, just as he confused Angie, but Helen had the quickness and sense to ask for guidance. And unlike Angie, not being stubborn, she was a quick learner. How pretty she looked this evening; enchanting! All thin soft arms and plump naked shoulders, her cream silk slip barely covering a swelling breast—cautiously nibbling, with little, even teeth, the edges of her Bath Oliver biscuit, careful not to spill the taramosalata, made by Clifford perhaps just a fraction too liquid.
“Because your mother is your father’s inspiration,” said Clifford, “and though that’s hard luck on your mother, sacrifices must be made in the cause of art. Art is more important than the individual—even than the painter who created it. Your father would be the first to acknowledge that, monster though he is. Moreover a painter needs his gestalt—the peculiar combination of circumstances which enables him to express his particular vision of the universe. Your father’s gestalt, more’s the pity, includes Applecore Cottage, your mother, quarrels with neighbors, paranoia about the art world in general and me in particular. It also until now has included you. You’ve been snatched away. That’s shock enough. It’s driven him into the garage, and with any luck we’ll see a change of style when he emerges. Let’s just hope that the new is more salable than the old.”
He carefully removed Helen’s Bath Oliver, put it to one side and kissed her salty mouth.
“I suppose,” said Helen, “you didn’t move me in here with you just to make my father’s painting easier to sell?” and he laughed, but there was a little pause before he did, as if he himself almost wondered. Truly successful people often act by an instinct which works to their advantage: they don’t have to plot, or scheme. They just follow their noses, and life itself bows down before them. Clifford loved Helen. Of course he did. Nevertheless, John Lally’s daughter! Part of a gestalt which needed a shock, a shove, a shaking-up—
But they forgot these matters soon enough, and Clifford also forgot to say that Angie Wellbrook’s father had called him from Johannesburg during the week.
“I thought I should warn you,” boomed the sad, powerful voice. “My daughter’s on the warpath.”
“What about?” Clifford had been light and cool.
“God knows. She doesn’t like the Old Masters. She says the future lies with Moderns. She says Leonardo’s is throwing its money away. What did you do? Stand her up? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just remember, although I’m a major shareholder, she acts for me in the U.K. and there’s no controlling her. She’s a shrewd girl though a pain in the ass.”
Clifford thanked him and promised to send him the excellent reviews of the Bosch exhibition and press reports of the unprecedented queues outside it, assured him that his investment was well protected, and that the furtherance and support of contemporary art was becoming increasingly part of Leonardo’s provenance—in other words that Angie was out on a precarious limb. Then he called Angie and asked her out to lunch. He forgot to tell Helen about this too. But he left her languid on the bed in such a sensuous swoon he knew well enough she’d be only just recovering when he came back that evening.
Angie and Clifford went to Claridges. Miniskirts were just coming in. Angie turned up wearing a beige trouser-suit in fine, supple suede, and asked to be shown to Clifford’s table. She’d spent the morning in the beauty parlor but the hand of the girl who applied her false eyelashes had slipped and one of Angie’s eyes was red, so she had to wear dark glasses, the wearing of which other than on ski slopes she knew Clifford despised. It made her cross.
“I’m so sorry,” said the Headwaiter, rashly, “but it is not our policy to allow ladies in trousers into the Grand Restaurant.”
“Really?” inquired Angie, dangerously, made even crosser.
“If you will allow me to take you to the Luncheon Bar—”
“No,” said Angie. “You just take the trousers.”
And there and then she undid them, stepped out of them, handed them to the Headwaiter, and went on in, miniskirted, to join Clifford. A pity, Clifford thought, Angie’s legs were not better. They quite spoiled the gesture. All the same, he was impressed. So were many of the lunchers. Angie received a round of applause as she sat down.
“I know I’m a bastard,” Clifford said, over quails’ eggs, “I know I let you down, I know I’m a cad and a bounder, but the fact is, I’ve fallen in love.” And he raised his clear blue eyes to hers, and finding them covered by dark glasses, straightaway removed them.
“One of your eyes is red,” he remarked. “Quite horrid!” Somehow the gesture, the touch, the remark, made her believe that in love with someone else he might be, but matters between him and her were not finished. She was right.
“So where does that leave us?” she asked, one hand now covering the erring eye, scraping a little fattening mayonnaise from her egg with the knife in the other. He thought that if anything she was too skinny. In his bed she’d kept herself well covered with the black sheet and with good reason. (Thinness, in those days, was not as fashionable as now. A pattern of ribs beneath the skin was seen as unsightly.) Helen, perfectly at ease in her body, could cheerfully expose any part, in any position. Yet Angie’s very reticences had their charm.
“Friends,” he said.
“You mean,” she said, “you don’t want my father taking his millions out of Leonardo’s.”
“How well you know me,” he said, and laughed, looking directly at her with his bright knowledgeable eyes, and this time he moved her shielding hand, and her heart turned over, but what was the use?
“They’ll be my millions eventually,” said Angie. “And leaving you and me right out of it, I don’t like seeing them in Leonardo’s. Art’s a high-risk business.”
“Not anymore,” said Clifford Wexford, “not now I’m in charge.”
“But Clifford, you’re not.”
“I will be,” said Clifford.
She believed him. A crowd of photographers and reporters now clustered at Claridges’ door. Word had gotten around. They wanted a glimpse of Angie’s legs or, failing that, of the King of the Waiters discomposed, but the staff barred their way. The general uproar impressed Clifford. Publicity always did.
Angie was not ungratified, either. Well, she thought, Clifford will wear out Helen soon enough. Helen can’t command the press, as I can. Helen, the frame-maker’s daughter. Just another pretty face! Penniless, powerless, without place in the world except by courtesy of Clifford. He’d soon get bored. Angie decided to forgive Clifford and be content just to hate Helen. Should she say something scathing, unforgettable, about her rival? No. Clifford was too shrewd. He’d see through it. She’d go the other way instead.
“She’s a sweet, pretty girl,” she said, “and just what you need. Though you’ll have to sharpen up her dress sense a little. She really shouldn’t go around looking so humble. But I give up. I give in. I’ll be yours and Helen’s friend. And the crits of the Bosch exhibition were really impressive, Clifford. I may have been wrong. I’ll give Dad a call and reassure him.”
Clifford stood, moved around to where Angie sat, lifted her dull-complexioned face with its poor eye, and kissed her firmly on her lips. It was her reward. It was not enough, but something. She would claim what she deserved, what she had been promised, when the time was ripe. There was, she supposed, no hurry. She would wait, decades if she had to.
While Angie lunched with Clifford, Evelyn was on the phone to Helen.
“Oh, Mum,” said Helen, gratefully. “I thought you’d given up on me!”
“Well, I thought you’d better know just how upset your father is,” her mother said. “He’s left the garage, and now he’s up in the attic, cutting up his old canvases with the garden shears.
Fox Plus Chicken Pieces
is in shreds. He threw a section
of Beached Whale with Vultures
downstairs. He’s going to be so upset when he calms down and finds out what he’s done. He was on the whale painting for two years, Helen. You remember? All through your A levels.”
“I think you should go next door, Mum, and wait till he calms down.”
“They’re getting so sick of me next door.”
“Of course they’re not, Mum.”
“It is so important for your father not to be upset.”
“Mum, don’t you see, I am the excuse for his upset, not the reason for his upset.”
“No, Helen, I’m afraid I can’t see it that way.”
At three-fifteen Helen, crying, called Leonardo’s and left a message for Clifford to call home. Urgent. But he did not arrive back in the office until five o’clock. How he had been spending his time between two and five, reader, I am not going to divulge in detail. He had not meant such a thing to happen. Let us just say that Angie kept a suite at Claridges for her convenience when shopping on Bond Street—her house in Belgravia seeming to her too far from the heart of things, and her actions too closely observed by the butler and other staff—and that opportunity is, if not all, at least four-fifths of illicit and unexpected sexual congress. And Clifford felt he ought to make amends and, to his credit, was amused and more impressed by the news-hounds at her heels than he ever had been by her father’s millions. Besides he was so newly in love with Helen, the emotion had not had time to affect a deep-rooted habit of life—that is to say, of taking his pleasures when and as he usefully found them.
Be all that as it may, come five-thirty, Clifford reacted strongly and instantly not so much to Helen’s tears as to her account of her father’s behavior.
Fox Plus Chicken Pieces
was a minor and flawed piece but
Beached Whale with Vultures,
though unlikable on account of its subject matter—rotting flesh, stretched in glistening strands across an almost ethereal canvas—was a fine major work and Clifford was not about to have it under attack. His lawyers were at Judge Percibar’s within the hour—the eloquent Percibar a lifelong friend of Otto Wexford, Clifford’s father—and an injunction issued, restraining John Lally from damaging what turned out to be Leonardo’s property, inasmuch as, or so they claimed, the artist benefitted by a retainer from that august institution. And by the next morning, after a police car and a Leonardo’s van had turned up at the cottage, seven John Lally canvases had been transferred to Leonardo’s vaults, plus the shreds, recovered from the garden, of
Fox Plus Chicken Pieces,
and catalogued thus:
- Beached Whale with Vultures
—damaged - Massacre of the Turtles
—in fine condition - St. Peter and Cripple at Heaven’s Gate
—scratched - The Feast of Eyes
—stained (coffee?) - Kitten with Hand
—stained (bird droppings?) - Dead Flowerpiece
—in fine condition - Landscape of Bones
—slashed - Fox Plus Chicken Pieces
—remnant
The removal was done while John Lally slept off the effects of shock, overwork, temper and homemade wine. Evelyn tried to wake him as the Leonardo’s team tramped up and down the steep narrow stairs to the attic, maneuvering the idle canvases with some difficulty, but there was no waking him. She left a note and went to stay with the neighbors.
Reader, if you know even an amateur painter, or if you daub or dabble yourself, you will understand how any painter worth his salt hates to be parted from his paintings, in just the same way as a mother hates to be parted from her children. This leaves the painter in a terrible fix. If he doesn’t sell not only does he not eat, but he paints himself out of house and home. And then there is the enormous simple practical matter
of space:
where are the paintings to be kept? Yet if he does sell, and so makes room, it is like having a chunk of living flesh torn away. And it is so agitating. What kind of home is the work going to? Will it be safe? Was it bought because it was truly appreciated, or merely because it matched the wallpaper? Not, of course that John Lally had many worries on the latter score. There was never any question of a Lally canvas
blending.
He is what is called a gallery painter, fit for display on large bare walls and respectful viewing in public places, where little cries of shock and awe and distaste can be quickly sopped up by the warm, gently circulating, stuffy mausoleum air. (And what kind of fate, raged John Lally, is that for a painting?
Kitten with Hand
—the fingers with claws, the paw with nails—had for a time been hoisted into the air between two pine trees in the garden of Applecore Cottage, the better for the birds of the air to admire it, mere earth-swarming human beings so lacking in the capacity for proper appreciation.) And as for the small private galleries, run as they are by undiscriminating rogues who will take as much as fifty percent commission, these are the shit-holes of the Art World. Go to any opening, and see the phonies and the poseurs gawking and gaping and very publicly writing out their checks. On the whole John Lally preferred to simply give paintings away to friends. Then at least he could control who owned them, on whose wall they hung. Friends? What friends? For as quickly as his occasional charm won them, his paranoia and temper would drive them away. There were few enough around who were qualified to be Lally recipients.
