by Fay Weldon
“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 a
nd 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.
This was why, driven to fever pitch by the impossibility of solving the problem, or so John Lally saw it, he had consented to accept a retainer from Leonardo’s. And Leonardo’s (that is to say, Clifford Wexford) had done him other favors: taken a few canvases off his hands; had the broken-down garage rebuilt, damp-proofed and air-conditioned so that other paintings could be safely stacked and stored. They had windows built into the attic roof the better to illuminate his work with good natural north light. If John Lally chose to paint in the garage and store in the attic, no great harm would be done. But if John Lally took shears to his canvases, Leonardo’s would step in to claim what turned out, thanks to the Wexford small print, to be Leonardo’s property.
And John Lally had, in a way, trusted Clifford, even while hating and despising him, because in spite of everything Clifford had some sort of proper response to his work; and John Lally had felt sure that whatever else befell, Clifford would at least never do what some collectors did—put the paintings in a bank vault somewhere for safekeeping. This being to the painter the same as rendering him blind and deaf.
And now Clifford had done exactly this. And not, John Lally was convinced, when he roused himself from his stupor, and found the paintings gone, simply in order to preserve the canvases—they had survived many such a storm before and even as he shredded Fox Plus Chicken Pieces he was working out a new improved version in his head—but to be revenged. John Lally the impoverished artist, breaking down, splintering Clifford Wexford’s bedroom door, bursting in upon him—no, it was not forgotten, let alone forgiven! No. This was why eight fine paintings were now immured in Leonardo’s vault, while Clifford smiled and said lightly, “It’s for John Lally’s own good” and stretched his white daughter yet again upon the black satanic sheets. It was the artist’s punishment.
It was fifteen days before Evelyn dared to creep back into Applecore Cottage and start washing and sweeping again, and three months before life returned to anything resembling normal. John Lally then got on with The Rape by the Sabine Women in which he depicted the latter as insatiable harpies. A silly idea, but well-executed: he painted it on the wall of the henhouse, on the ground that it could then hardly end up in Leonardo’s vaults. Rather, wind and rain would presently obscure the painting altogether.
LITTLE NELL’S INHERITANCE
FOR SIX WEEKS NOW little Nell had snuggled tenderly and safely in Helen’s womb. She had inherited at least a degree of her maternal grandfather’s artistic talent, but not, you will be relieved to hear, his temper or his neuroses; she had all and more of her maternal grandmother’s sweetness, but not her tendency to the acute masochism which so often goes with it. She had her father’s energy and wit and not his, well, sneakiness. She was all set up to have her mother’s looks, but, unlike her mother, she was to feel it below her dignity to lie. All this, of course, was simply the luck of the draw: and not just Nell’s luck but ours as well—all of us who were to encounter her in later life. But our Nell had another quality too—her capacity to attract toward her the most untoward, even dangerous events, and the most disagreeable people. Perhaps it was in her stars: a tendency to drama inherited from Clifford’s father Otto—his early life, too, was lived in hazard—or perhaps it was, as my own mother would have it, that where you have angels, you have demons too. Evil circles good, as if trying to contain it: good being the powerful, moving, active force, and evil the nagging, restraining one. Well, you must make up your own mind as you read Nell’s story. This is a Christmas tale, and Christmas is a time fo
r believing in good, rather than bad: for seeing the former, not the latter, on the winning side.
As for Helen, she suspected that perhaps Nell, or someone, had come into existence, inasmuch as she suffered from a faint dizziness which affected her whenever she stood too suddenly, and because her breasts were so swollen and sore she could scarcely forget they were there—which most women do, most of the time, unless and until they’re pregnant. These symptoms, mind you, or so she told herself, might be due to love, and nothing more. The fact was that Helen didn’t want to be pregnant. Not yet. There was far too much to be done, seen, explored, thought about in the world which so suddenly and newly included Clifford.
And how could she, Helen, scarcely yet herself properly in the world, bring someone else along into it? And how could Clifford love her if she was pregnant; that is to say sick, swollen, tearful—as her mother had been during her last disastrous pregnancy, only five years back. That baby had miscarried, horribly and bloodily late in the pregnancy, and Helen had been horribly sorry and bloodily relieved when it happened, and confused by her own conflicting emotions. And John Lally had sat and held her mother’s hand, with a tenderness she had never seen before, and she had found herself jealous—and planned there and then to leave home after A levels and go to Art College, and Get Out, Get Out—
Well now, what it added up to was that Helen now just wanted to forget the past and love Clifford and prepare for a glittering future and not be pregnant. Because Clifford had asked her to marry him. Or had he asked her? Or just somehow said, sometime in the middle of one of their lively, enchanted nights, part sticky, part silky, part velvet-black, part glowing lamplight, “I must tell my parents about all this. They’ll want some kind of marriage ceremony, they’re like that” and so, casually, the matter had been settled. Since the bride’s parents were so clearly incapable of arranging anything, it would be left to the bridegroom’s. Besides, the latter’s income exceeded the former’s by a ratio of a hundred to one, or thereabouts.
