by Fay Weldon
But as to Nell, there seemed nothing more he could do. He met Helen, discreetly, in a coffee shop and told her to accept the advice and help of those around her, those who loved her, and acknowledge that Nell was dead, but somehow she didn’t seem to be listening—only to the inner voice that kept repeating “she’s alive.” He would not accept her check. It was very small, in any case. She had saved it out of her housekeeping money. She had no idea how expensive he was. He didn’t tell her.
He wanted to embrace her, if only to protect her. Her future was somehow so threatened by her own nature. Or was the desire to hold her something very different indeed? Well, probably, but what was the point.
She finished her coffee and prepared to go. She placed her white hand on his black cheek for a moment and said, “Thank you. I’m glad there are men like you in the world.”
“How do you see me?”
“Brave,” she said. “Brave, responsible and kind.”
What she meant was, of course, not like my father, not like Clifford, and I am sorry to say she hardly counted Simon as a man at all!
CONVERSATIONS
READER, I SHALL RECORD some conversations for you. The first one is between Clifford Wexford and Fanny, his secretary/mistress. The scene is Clifford’s architect-designed house outside Geneva, all elegant luxury, with its shell-shaped swimming pool reflecting blue sky and snowy mountains, its drawings on the pale paneled walls (the drawings keep changing: today it’s a rather fine Frink drawing of a horse, a John Lally sketch of a dead dog, three John Piper landscapes and a very fine Rembrandt etching indeed) and its gently macho pale leather armchairs and glass tables.
“Clifford,” says Fanny sharply, “you cannot blame Helen for Nell’s death. It was you who had her kidnapped. It was because of you she was on the plane. If anyone’s to blame, it’s you!
Fanny is fed up, and well she might be. First Clifford asked her to move in with him simply because Nell was coming to stay. Since the dreadful day of the plane crash, she has stayed to nurse Clifford through his grief and distress, which has been bad enough. She has covered for him at work because his depression has at times been so deep he has drunk too much and been in no position to make decisions. And decisions have to be made. In another five short months Leonardo’s must open its new Geneva galleries, devoted to the work of modern masters, and those modern masters, somehow or other, must be on the walls on opening day. Paintings have to be wrested out of artists’ studios, or out of the houses they have somehow ended up in—given away when drunk, or sold in defiance of contract—and they carry enormous and problematic insurance premiums. But mostly it is artistic decisions which have to be made: is it to be this painting or that? And it was these decisions Fanny made, in Clifford’s name. She had made them very well, and now that he is sober and himself again, he will give her no credit on the catalogue. She is furious. Let him put his arms around her at night as he might, let him sweet-talk her as he would, she is simply not having it.
“You are self-centered, selfish, greedy and conceited!” she yells, she who is usually soft and docile. “You don’t love me anymore.”
“I never did,” he says. “I think we’ve worn each other out. Hadn’t you better pack your bags and go?”
End of conversation: end of affair. She had not quite expected it. She thought he would follow her. He didn’t. The very next day a picture appeared in the Geneva morning paper. It was of Clifford Wexford in a nightclub with his arm around Trudi Barefoot, the film star who had just written a best-selling novel. Now that Fanny came to think of it, over the last week Trudi had been putting through a call or two.
Another conversation. Fanny sits at her desk in Clifford’s outer office, in Leonardo’s cool, new, marble mansion, and wrestles with humiliation and grief. Clifford comes in. She thinks perhaps he will apologize.
“You still here?” he asks. “I thought you said you were going.”
So she has lost her job as well as her lover, and what she now perceives to have been love.
Her successor, younger and more conventionally pretty than she, but with a still loftier degree in Art History from the Courtauld itself, and taking an even lower salary than Fanny, arrives just as Fanny is leaving. (She has had to fire herself—hiring and firing is part of the job.) The new girl’s name is Carol.
“Are the prospects as good as they say?” asks Carol.
“Let us say they are all-embracing,” says Fanny.
“Will I get to make my own artistic decisions?” asks Carol.
“I daresay the occasion will arise,” says Fanny, watching four porters steer in a particularly brilliant Jackson Pollock, selected by Fanny in Clifford’s name. “But I shouldn’t bother.”
End of conversation. And Fanny goes back to live with her parents in Surrey. She had given up her little flat above the delicatessen in Geneva, on Clifford’s advice, at the height of their—what? Romance? hardly!—amorous business arrangement. It all hurt, dreadfully. But girls who go into the Art World have a hard time. There’s money to spare, and love and excitement too, but only at the top; and it’s men who’re at the top. Where are they ever not, except possibly in the go-go business?
Another conversation, in another country.
“You don’t love me,” says Simon Cornbrook to Helen at about the same time as Fanny loses her job. He is pale, and his bright eyes are desperate behind his owl glasses. He is not a tall man, or a particularly handsome one, but he is shrewd, intelligent, kind and, like any ordinary husband, wants his wife’s love and attention. Helen looks up at him in surprise. She is nursing Edward. All her attention now goes to the baby and, or so Simon feels, to the memory of Nell, which she cradles to herself as she would another living child, to the almost total exclusion of himself.
“Of course I love you!” she says, surprised. “Simon, of course I do. You’re Edward’s father!” Now that was not the most tactful thing in the world to say. But it was what she meant.
“And Clifford is Nell’s father, I suppose.”
Helen sighs. “Clifford is in another country,” she says, “and besides, we’re divorced. What is the matter, Simon?”
We know well enough what the matter is. It is that she has married Simon for the warmth, comfort and safety he could give her, all raggedy and jaggedy as she was, fresh out of her marriage to Clifford, thinking that was all she would ever want from a man again, and Simon knows it; and now it isn’t enough. He wants Helen’s erotic response, her emotional involvement: he wants her to care, and all she cares about is baby Edward, and dead Nell, and lost Clifford. Not Simon at all. Both know it. There is no evading it anymore; he didn’t really have to ask. Helen bends further over Edward, and croons gently to him, not wanting to meet her husband’s eye. He lifts her head and slaps her. It isn’t a hard slap: more as if he is trying to bring her back to life; but of course it doesn’t work; it is unforgivable. He has hit a woman, his wife, mother of his new baby, doing nothing at all to offend or provoke him, just sitting there asking him what the matter can be.
Simon mumbles his apologies and goes back to his office, and there finds Janice Best, one of the new breed of brilliant young hacks recently taken on by his paper, and after a session at El Vino’s—“Simon, what are you doing here? You never come here!”—goes back home with Janice (no, reader, she didn’t start life with that name, but it doesn’t look half bad as a byline—Janice Best (Jan is best. Geddit?) and whether or not Simon did indeed strike some kind of erotic chord in her, or whether she was just pretending, we will never know, because Janice isn’t telling. Either way, she knew Simon would be useful to her. And as for Simon, he knew that in Janice he found a response simply not available in Helen. Janice Best! Janice Best! Your writer feels quite chilly!
REVIVALS
BUT THESE ADULT RELATIONSHIPS, for all their pain, trouble and complications, are trivial, don’t you think, compared to the welfare of a child? If only Helen had been a fraction less foolish and willful, if only Clifford had b
een a little less intolerant, they would never have parted, and Nell would have grown up in peace, to fill her proper, destined place in the world. As it is, what they have all come to!
Helen wonders what she feels about Simon’s affair (making the front page of the scandal sheets) with the ebullient Janice, and finds she feels very little at all. It is as if with Nell’s disappearance whole sets of emotions have disappeared too. She is all attention to her little son Edward—but even that love is cautious, as if it too might suddenly be snatched away. Not that he notices.
Clifford telephoned her from Geneva, one evening when she was alone and puttering about quite happily, and drowsing, and reading, and writing to her mother, and wondering a little, but only a little, where Simon was.
“Helen?” Clifford said, and the voice, with its kind of charming, husky, double tone, so familiar yet so long unheard, stirred her at once to alertness, wakefulness, response. And that was good, except that with the waking came that other double tone, the pain and misery. No wonder Helen drowsed through her days!
“You okay, Helen? All this stuff in the papers about the dwarf—”
“Clifford,” said Helen, lightly, “they make these things up, as you ought to be the first to know. Simon and I are just fine! How are you and Trudi Barefoot?”
“Why don’t you ever speak the truth?” he asked. “Why do you always lie?” and before they’d even begun, they were having a row. That was the way it was. He offered his concern, she denied it out of pride; she was jealous, he was angry; she was hurt. Around and around it went, the wrong way!
And Clifford was right: these days she did lie. There were truths about herself so great which she declined to face that all the little truths went by the board. If she and Clifford had stayed together, and faced their own natures, and so been in a position to reform them, she would have been less of a liar now, less slippery, less somehow unsatisfactory as a person, less easy for Simon to betray. And Clifford would have been less cruel, less calculating, less vengeful on the female sex: less concerned with his own image. He would have changed partners less frequently, and changed himself instead.
Men are so romantic, don’t you think? They look for a perfect partner, when what they should be looking for is perfect love. They find failings in their loved one (of course they do! Who’s perfect? They’re not!) when the failing of course is in themselves: in their own inability to perfectly love. It was still Clifford’s habit to make checklists as he searched for the woman who would really, truly, permanently suit him. She must be beautiful, highly educated, intelligent, a little shorter than he, plumply breasted and slim-legged, know many languages, ski, play tennis, be a perfect hostess, an excellent cook, be well-read—and so forth and so on. And yet the woman he had come nearest to perfectly loving was Helen—and she certainly did fairly badly, checked off against the list. Poor Clifford, hoping to find solace in fame and fortune, when there is so little to be found there, as anyone who is anyone knows.
And as for little Nell, now called Brigitte, victim of her parents’ failings—consider her plight! She was five; it was time she went to school. Milord and Milady were in a right fix. They had hardly left the château since Nell came into it, for wondering how to explain Nell’s presence.
“I shall say she is my daughter,” Milady said when Nell first arrived, looking at her aged face in a cracked mirror and seeing a young girl, as was her habit. “What is the problem, mon ami?”
Milord was not cruel enough to explain what the problem was—that is to say, his wife’s refusal to grow old. It would have been sensible enough to claim Brigitte as a grandchild; few questions would have been asked, she could have gone to school, the matter of papers and documents somehow overlooked. But Milady would not hear of it. Brigitte was to be her child, she was not old enough to be a grandmother—anyone could see that! So all Milord could do was keep Brigitte at home, with an elderly, trusted, discreet servant, and hope the problem would go away. But of course it didn’t. Little Brigitte grew older, and longed for friends, and company, and young people, and to learn everything in the world there was to learn. And Milord and Milady, for all their eccentricity, worried on Brigitte’s account. They wanted the child to be happy, and normal—as indeed they themselves had once been, long ago, before Time and Senility had started their wicked work. Some grow old peacefully and without woe—Milord and Milady fought every inch of the way; and little Brigitte—sometimes quiet and sad, it was true, for no reason anyone could think of; but more often skipping about her domain, her ancient château, bringing life, laughter and light into every corner of it—was their finest weapon.
Black magic, I am sorry to have to reveal, was the other. Milady dabbled just a little, occasionally, and Milord would help her, when it took his fancy. Rumors of it reached the village, from time to time, and ensured that even fewer people went near the château than otherwise—heaven knew it was a grim and eerie place enough, with its high tower half-hidden by unkempt trees which seemed to toss about even if there was no wind. Nell saw it differently, of course: the château was her home, and we all, especially children, think of home as a safe place. If there was a pentagram or two about, and the occasional drifting smell of heavy incense, what is a five-year-old to make of that? For all she knows it’s how everyone lives.
The villagers were indulgent to Milord and Milady. They were realistic: they didn’t believe in magic, black or white, not really. Only the youngsters loved to grow hysterical and claim they were being spooked. Dabble as they might, thought the villagers, the old couple could hardly do themselves or anyone else much harm. Let them get on with it. Had they known there was a child in the château, someone might have intervened. But they didn’t know. How could they? And Christmas Day came and went and no one knew it was Nell’s birthday. The de Troites, in any case, did not celebrate birthdays. What’s more, they did their best to ignore Christmas. They felt that to celebrate the season openly might perhaps be an insult to their master, the devil.
So picture their Christmas breakfast. Milord and Milady tried to make it a day like any other. They tottered downstairs at nine in the morning, as was their custom, carefully avoiding damage to their gnarled hands where the banister was broken, and to their fragile legs where the stair was rotten. They came into the great high kitchen, where mice scuttled happily along roof beams, and black beetles raced along the dusty flag floor—Marthe’s eyesight was bad. It wasn’t that she didn’t sweep; she just couldn’t see the floors very well—and found Marthe, as usual, preparing coffee in the tall chipped enamel pot and, unusually, Nell making toast in front of the big fire which burned in the hearth all winter—daily, the four of them dragged and maneuvered branches from the massive pile prepared last autumn by John-Pierre the woodcutter. (John-Pierre’s mind had been unhinged in the war, but his muscles were still good. On the days Marthe was sent down to the village to fetch him up, Nell would be kept amused somewhere else in the château. It was not difficult. In its great days the château had housed a family of twenty and a staff of forty, and adding whole wings, not to mention barns, stables, follies, had kept all busily and happily occupied. But these are matters which can’t concern us now. We have our own story to get on with.)
“What is the little one doing?” Milady asked Marthe. (I am translating for you, of course.)
“She is making toast,” said Marthe.
“What a strange thing to do,” said Milord.
Now of course the making of toast is an English not a French habit, if only because the nature of bread is so different in each country. Helen had made it as a child in Applecore Cottage, crouching in front of the fire in the little Register grate, the bread on the end of a long brass toasting-fork, with one bent prong and a lion’s head for a handle. And just once, the week before Nell boarded ZOE 05, she’d made it for the little girl, opening the door of the solid fuel Aga in the Muswell Hill kitchen to do so, using the carving fork, to the danger and pinkening of her fingers.
“I
am making toast,” said Nell, “because it is Christmas Day.” She used a long forked stick to hold the chunks of bread.
“How does the little one know it is Christmas Day?” The de Troites seldom spoke to their little Brigitte directly.
“The church bells are ringing and it’s winter,” said Nell. “So I expect it’s Christmas. People do nice things at Christmas, and toast is nice. Isn’t it?” she added, uncertainly, for Milord and Milady looked decidedly put out. Rheumy eyes flashed and arthritic fingers tapped.
“I have said nothing,” said Marthe. “I expect she has read about it in a book.”
“But who has taught the little one to read?”
“She has taught herself,” said Marthe. And so indeed Nell had, from the alphabet of rag books left over from the great days of the château, damp and mouse-nibbled but still legible, she’d found in an attic. Moreover, though she knew she was not allowed out of the château grounds, and would not have dreamed of disobeying, she would sometimes sit on the branch of a tree which overhung the lane which wound down to the village, and from which, hidden, she could watch the strange, vigorous, giant people of the outside world coming and going, and had begun to make sense of their lives.
Milord and Milady sighed and tutted but presently ate the toast, charred on the outside and cold and damp inside, and not at all successful—with quantities of butter and Marthe’s homemade apricot jam, and all without a word of complaint. And that of course is the best kind of present a child can have—to have her efforts commended, even though at some sacrifice to those who do the commending. Nell hugged them all—Milord, Milady and Marthe—and their dark master kept his distance.
