The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  No one (who was anyone) except Clifford knew that Helen was more than three months pregnant on her wedding day—oh, and Angie of course, but she had not been sent an invitation and had returned to Johannesburg to lick her wounds. (Though Angie meant to have Clifford in the end and no amount of “I will’s” and “I do’s” to someone else would daunt her permanently.) It was a wonderful day in any number of ways. Sir Larry Patt came up to Clifford at the reception and said:

  “Clifford, I give up. You are the new world. I am the old. I am resigning. You are to be managing director of Leonardo’s. The Board decided yesterday. You are much too young, and I told them so, but they didn’t agree. So now it’s up to you, lad.”

  Clifford’s happiness was complete. Never would there be such a day as this again! Helen slipped her little white hand in his and squeezed it, and he did not squeeze hers in return, but said, “How’s the baby?” and she said “Hush!” and had no idea at all that he no longer totally accepted her, but judged her, and thought the squeeze childish and vulgar.

  Lady Rowena looked boyish in a gray tunic dress, white frilly blouse and cravat, and fluttered her false eyelashes (everyone was wearing them) at one of Cynthia Wexford’s cousins from Minneapolis, and made a rapid assignation with him beneath his wife’s nose. Cynthia noticed and sighed. She should never have invited the cousins over: she should have stuck to her principles and kept no contact at all with the family which had so insulted and abused her in her youth. Bad enough that these things ran in the blood. Her father had loved her dearly one day, spurned her totally the next. She had been instrumental in getting the family out of Denmark; had risked torture, life itself, to do it: he had thanked her coldly, but not smiled at her. He would not forgive. She tried not to think of him. Clifford looked like her father: had stared at her with childish eyes as blue as his grandfather’s. That was the trouble. She hoped he would be happy, that Helen would do for him what she could not, that is to say, love him. But perhaps he hadn’t noticed. She’s always behaved as if she loved him, or thought she had.

  Otto and Cynthia went home in their Rolls Royce. Johnnie drove. He kept a loaded revolver in the glove box, for old times’ sake. Cynthia thought Otto was a little subdued.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “I’m sure if anyone can make Clifford happy, Helen can. Mind you, as a baby he was never exactly content. She’ll have her work cut out for her.”

  “All that worries me,” said Otto gloomily, “is what he’ll do for an encore. Head of Leonardo’s at his age! It’ll go to his head.”

  “Too late,” said Cynthia. “He already thinks he’s God.”

  Clifford and Helen spent the night in the Ritz, where the double beds are the best and softest and prettiest in London.

  “What did your parents give us for a wedding present?” asked Clifford, and Helen wished he hadn’t asked. He seemed in an odd mood, both elated and yet somehow restless.

  “A toaster,” she said.

  “You’d think your father would have given us one of his paintings,” said Clifford. Since Clifford already had a dozen small Lallys on his walls, bought for a song, and eight major paintings in Leonardo’s vaults, where no one could see them, Helen didn’t think so at all. But she was twenty-two and a nobody, and Clifford was thirty-five, and very much somebody, so she didn’t say so. After the episode of the de Waldo clinic, she had become less able to laugh at him, tease him out of his moods, enchant him. She took him, in fact, too seriously for his own good, let alone hers. She had been in the wrong. She was her mother’s daughter as well as her father’s and it showed.

  She had other things to worry about, besides. She lay in bed and worried about them. Clifford had bought a house in Primrose Hill, in the then-unfashionable North West London, near the Zoo, to be their marital home. He’d sold Coffee Place for £2,500 and bought the Chalcot Square house for £6,000, judging that presently it would be worth a great deal more. (He was quite right. That very house changed hands recently for half a million pounds.) Clifford hadn’t put the property into joint ownership. He didn’t see why he should. This, after all, was the sixties, and a man’s property was a man’s property, and a man’s wife serviced it, and was supposed to feel grateful for the privilege. Could she run it properly? She was so young. She knew she was untidy. She had given up her work at Sotheby’s, and started going to Cordon Bleu cookery lessons, but even so! Clifford had said, and she could see that he was right, that she would need all her time and energy to run the house, and entertain his friends and colleagues, who, as he himself pointed out, were getting grander and greater all the time. Would there be enough time, enough energy, with a baby on the way? And when would she tell people about the baby? It was embarrassing. Nevertheless, she was full of hope, as befitted a girl on her wedding night. She hoped, for example, Clifford’s friends, colleagues and clients would not think her to be an inefficient, stupid child. She hoped that Clifford would not, either. She hoped she would be able to cope with a baby: she hoped she would not yearn for her freedom and her friends, or miss her mother and father too much; she hoped in fact she had done the right thing. Yet what choice had she ever had? You met someone, and that was that.

  Clifford kissed her, and his mouth was warm and passionate and he embraced her, and his arms were lean and strong. It had been a long day, a wedding day; a hundred hands had been shaken, a hundred good wishes received. If she was anxious it was because she was tired. But how strange, that along with the physical reassurances of love, keeping pace, marking step, like some little brother determined to be taken seriously, anxiety came too, and a fear for the future, the sense that life flowed like waves toward the shore, forever dispersed before they quite arrive; and worse, that the higher the crest, the lower the trough must be, so that even happiness is something to be feared.

  In the middle of the night, the pretty gold enameled telephone on the bedside table rang. Helen answered it. Clifford always slept heavily; never for long, but soundly, his blond head heavy against the pillow, his hand tucked against his cheek, like a child. Helen thought, even as she picked up the receiver, quickly, so he was not disturbed, how wonderful to know so private a thing about so remarkable a man. The call came from Angie in Johannesburg. She was asking how the wedding had been, apologizing for her absence.

  “But you weren’t even invited,” Helen longed to say, but didn’t. Could Angie speak to Clifford, Angie asked, and congratulate him on being made managing director of Leonardo’s? After all, it was her father who had arranged it.

  “It’s two in the morning, Angie,” said Helen, as reproachfully as she dared. “Clifford’s asleep.”

  “And he sleeps so heavily!” said Angie. “I know only too well. Try pinching his bum. That usually works. Ah, the thought of it. Lucky old you!”

  “How do you know?” asked Helen.

  “The way so many of us know, darling.”

  “When?” asked Helen, bleakly. “Where?”

  “Who, me? Long long in the past, darling, for Clifford. At least a couple of months. Not since your abortive night in the Clinic. That was at Coffee Place. Though before that, of course, many times, many places. But you know all that. Do just wake him. Don’t be a jealous little goose. If I’m not jealous, and I’m not, why should you be?”

  Helen put the phone down and wept, but quietly and silently, so that Clifford didn’t hear, and wake. Then, as a practical gesture, she took the phone off the hook, so Angie couldn’t call back. Outrage and distress would get her nowhere; she knew that. She must calm herself as quickly as she could, and somehow start constructing a new vision of herself, and Clifford, and her marriage.

  FIRST DAYS

  IT WAS REMARKABLE, ONCE the wedding was over, how Helen’s waist thickened: two days later and the wedding dress would not fasten; a week, and she could not pull it over her bosom without the seams threatening to give.

  “Extraordinary,” said Clifford, who kept asking her to try on the dress, as if to take the measure of h
er pregnancy by eye. “I suppose now you feel you can relax. Well, you can’t. There’s a lot to be done.”

  And so indeed there was. The house in Primrose Hill had to be turned from a rooming-house to a dwelling fit for a Wexford, his new burgeoning wife, and to receive the friends he meant to have—and since Clifford was always busy, Helen would have to do it. And so she did. He was solicitous of her pregnancy, but would not allow her to be ill. If she bent retching over the basin in the morning, he would clap his hands briskly and say “Enough!” and by some magic it would be. He required no consultation about paper, paint or furniture, other than the walls should be fit to hang paintings upon, and the furniture be antique, not new, since new had no resale value. He seemed to approve of what she did: or at least he did not say he did not. On weekends he played tennis, and she watched, and admired and clapped. He liked her applause. But then he liked anyone’s applause. She understood that.

  “You are not very sportif,” he complained. She supposed that Angie, perhaps, had been, and others.

  On the surface, things went well. Days were sunny and active, the baby kicked; the nights awkward and less wild, but reassuring. Presently acquaintances of Clifford’s put in a cautious appearance at the house and, finding his new young wife not as silly as they had feared, stayed around and became friends. Her friends came, looked, drifted away, finding her in some way lost to them. How could they, young, poor, mildly bohemian, without ambition, be at ease with Clifford Wexford who required more than mere humanity as a recommendation? How, when it came to it, could she? She saw she must be more Wexford wife, less daughter of Applecore Cottage. She learned to do without the chatter and closeness of her friends, the agreeable warmth of their concern; when they drifted off she did not tug them back. They were nice people; they would have come, Clifford or not. Reader, the truth was, she was weighty, and heavy, and began to lumber—you know how women will in late pregnancy—and the baby pressed upon the sciatic nerve, but she gritted her teeth, and set her smile to Fair against weariness and complaint, for Clifford’s sake. She would be everything to Clifford. He would never look at another woman again. And at the same time she knew it was no use. She had lost him, though how or why she was not sure.

  A TIME OF HAPPINESS

  BABY NELL WAS BORN on Christmas Day, 1965, in the Middlesex Hospital. Now, Christmas is not a good time to have a baby. The nurses drink too much sherry and spend their time singing carols; the young doctors kiss them under the mistletoe; senior surgeons dress up as Father Christmas. Helen gave birth to Nell unattended, in a private ward, where she lay alone. Had she been in the ordinary public ward at least one of the other patients would have been there to help; as it was, her red light glowed in the nurses’ station hour after hour and no one noticed. It was not yet the fashion for fathers to be present at the birth of their baby, and Clifford, in any case, would have shuddered at the very possibility. As it was, he and Helen had been asked to a Christmas Eve dinner by the eminent painter David Firkin, who was thinking of moving from the Beaux Arts Gallery to Leonardo’s, and Clifford did not wish to forgo the invitation. It seemed important. Helen had her first tentative pain in the taxi on the way to the Firkin studio. She did not, of course, want to be a nuisance.

  “I don’t suppose it’s anything,” she said. “Probably only indigestion. Tell you what, you drop me off at the hospital and they’ll have a look at me and send me home and I’ll come on to David’s in a taxi.”

  Clifford took Helen at her word and dropped her off at the hospital, and went on to the dinner alone. Helen did not follow.

  “Even if she was in labor,” said David Firkin, “which I doubt, first babies take forever so there’s no need to worry. It’s an entirely natural process. Now don’t be a bore and keep calling the hospital.” David Firkin hated children, and was proud of it. Helen was a fine, healthy girl, all the guests said, no need to worry. And no one started counting back on their fingers as to how many months it was since the marriage—or at least, no one that Clifford noticed.

  As it was, Helen was indeed a fine, healthy girl, if frightened, and Nell was a fine, healthy baby, and arrived safely, if on her own, at 3:10 A.M. Nell’s sun had left Sagittarius and was just into Capricorn, making her both lively and effective; she had the moon in Aquarius rising, which made her kind, charming, generous and good; Venus stood strong in mid-heaven, in its own house, Libra, and that made her full of desires, and capable of giving and receiving love. But Mercury was too close to Mars, and Neptune was in opposition to both, and her sun opposed her moon, and so Nell was to be prone to strange events through her life, and to great misfortunes, alternating with great good fortune. Saturn in conjunction with the sun, and powerful, and also opposed in the twelfth house, suggested that prisons and institutions would loom large in her life: there would be times when she would look out at the world from behind bars. Or that’s one way of looking at it all. It will do. How better are we to account for the events that fate, and not our natures, causes?

  A nurse, shamefaced, came hurrying in on hearing Nell’s first cry, and when the baby, washed and wrapped, was finally placed in Helen’s arms, Helen fell in love: not as she had fallen in love with Clifford, all erotic excitement and apprehension mixed, but powerfully, steadily, and permanently. When Clifford was wrested from the after-dinner brandy and crackers (Harrods Xmas Best) and came to her bedside at four in the morning, she showed him the baby, almost fearfully, leaning over the crib, pulling back the blanket from the small face. She still never knew quite what Clifford was going to like, or dislike, approve or condemn. She had become shy of him, almost timorous. She did not know what the matter was. She hoped the arrival of Nell would make things better. She did not, you will notice, think of her own pain, or resent Clifford’s abandonment of her at such a time, just of how best to please him. In those first few pregnant months of her marriage, she was, as I say, more like her mother than at any other time of her life.

  “A girl!” he said, and for a moment Helen thought he meant to disapprove, but he looked at his daughter and smiled, and said, “Don’t frown, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be okay,” and Helen could have sworn the baby stopped frowning at once and smiled back, although the nurses said that was impossible: babies did not smile for six weeks. (All nurses say this, and all mothers know otherwise.)

  He picked the baby up.

  “Careful,” said Helen, but there was no need. Clifford was accustomed to handling objects of great value. And there and then he felt, to his surprise, and acutely, both the pain and pleasure of fatherhood—the piercing anxious needle in the heart which is the drive to protect, the warm reassuring glow which is the conviction of immortality, the recognition of privilege, the knowledge that it is more than just a child you hold in your arms, but the whole future of the world, as it works through you. More, he felt absurdly grateful to Helen for having the baby, making the feeling possible. For the first time since he had rescued her from the de Waldo Clinic, he kissed her with ungrudging love. He had forgiven her, in fact, and Helen glowed in his forgiveness.

  “All be well,” she said, shutting her eyes and quoting something she had read, but not quite sure what: “—and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” and Clifford did not even snub her by asking for the source of the quotation. And so it was, very well indeed, for a time.

  Until she was nearly a year old, then, Nell lived in the cocoon of happiness created by her parents. Leonardo’s flourished under Clifford Wexford’s guidance—an interesting Rembrandt was acquired, a few tedious Dutch Masters sold, the putative Botticelli labeled and hung as such, to the Uffizi’s astonishment, and in the new contemporary section, the price of a David Firkin (now required to paint no more than two paintings a year, lest he spoil his own market) soared to five figures. Helen lost fifteen pounds and worshipped Clifford and baby Nell in turns. It is even pleasanter—if more difficult—to love, than to be loved. When both happen at once, what higher joy can there be?


  A TIDAL WAVE OF TROUBLE

  READER, A MARRIAGE THAT is rapidly put together can rapidly unravel: like a hand-knitted sweater, which if you snip just one strand and pull, and go on pulling, comes to nothing at all. Just a pile of wrinkled junk. Or put it another way: you think you’re living in a palace but actually it’s just a house of cards. Disturb one card and the whole lot falls and flattens and is nothing. When Nell was ten months old, the Wexford marriage fell in ruins about the poor child’s ears—phut, phut, phut—one nasty event falling fast upon another quicker than you can imagine.

  This is how it happened.

  The Conrans gave a Guy Fawkes Day fireworks party. Remember? Terence, who started Habitat? And Shirley, later of Superwoman and Lace? Everyone who was anyone was there, and that included the Wexfords.

  Helen left Nell behind with the Nanny: she didn’t want the child frightened by bangs and crashes. She went ahead of Clifford, who was coming straight from Leonardo’s. She wore an embroidered leather coat and boots with many tassels, and looked slim, vulnerable, very pretty and tender, and somehow amazed, and slightly stunned, as young women recently married to active men do tend to look: that is to say, very attractive to other men, making them behave like stags in the rutting season, all locked mighty antlers and “I’ll have what’s yours, by God and nature that I will!” If she’d worn her old brown coat it mightn’t have happened.