The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  The tabac in the Rue Victor Hugo pointed Arthur Hockney’s way to a particular cafe: here money changed hands and what amounted to a guided tour of certain brothels in the Algerian quarter, from which, or so his contacts told him, many deals in human lives were made. It served as an international clearinghouse for the selling of men, women and children into domestic or sexual slavery, and for the new, growing, less dangerous but highly profitable black market in children for adoption. Kidnapped or legitimately orphaned (their phrase) children were smuggled out of the Third World and sold from dealer to dealer, fetching higher prices as they went, until finally reaching the punter. The two markets—for slaves and for children—are kept apart, but sometimes overlap. This, of course, had always been Arthur’s fear for little Nell. He was the more relieved when, this time, the trail led him to Maria, the only employee of this house of illest fame to have survived the many staff turnovers (not to mention deaths) since ZOE 05 crashed.

  Maria sat and sighed and curled her long dark hair around her finger. She had a childish air, he thought.

  “I am a very respectable woman,” she said. “I am only doing this for a little, until I can find a proper job.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “And I am doing a kindness to my clients,” she said, “and saving their wives from much distress.”

  “I know,” he said gently.

  “So long as you understand. I have too kind a heart, that is my trouble. When the little English girl came I took good care of her. I made sure she saw nothing she should not see.”

  “I thank you, on her parents’ behalf.”

  “Oh, she had parents? Usually the parents are dead. What is to become of these children if no one looks after them?”

  “What indeed?”

  “The little English girl was fortunate. Sometimes the life is not so nice, especially for a child. She went to new parents in Cherbourg.”

  “Cherbourg? You are sure?”

  “No. The name just came into my head. I have always liked Cherbourg. I went there when I was a child, with my mama.”

  “Please try and remember. It’s important.”

  “Cherbourg. I am convinced of it.”

  “The name of her parents?”

  “How could I remember a thing like that? You must understand I live a very eventful life. I see so many people.”

  “Please try.”

  “I remember thinking, yes, she was very lucky. I know. She went to a Milord and a Milady. If only that had been my fortune! I too was adopted. Everyone laughed.”

  “Why did they laugh?”

  “Perhaps the Milord and the Milady were funny. I am becoming very tired. Perhaps we should go to my room?”

  “Not yet.”

  No, there had been nothing special about the man who brought the child in. No, she couldn’t remember if he smoked. Well, it was a long time ago. Many men had passed through her bed since, how could she remember this one? But she remembered the child. She remembered her good turn, in particular. Odd, things had turned out well for her since.

  “What good turn was that?” Arthur asked. He had had to buy time with the girl. She had a broad face and strong arms, a lot of body hair and a strong, not unpleasant, smell. She busied herself with tweezers, plucking hair from her legs. She was the sort of woman who liked to make good use of her time. She should have had six children and lived in a farmhouse, Arthur thought. (But that’s the kind of thing men do wish for women, without considering just how hard and boring the domestic life can be.)

  The little girl had had a jewel on a chain in her possession, Maria said. It was obvious she came from a good home; you could tell, the way you could with kittens; she had been loved and cherished; she was not the scum of the earth which usually turned up, already gray-faced and squinty-eyed from hard times and bad luck. It had made her cry, just to think of it: la pauvre petite! So instead of simply purloining the emerald as anyone sensible would have done, she made it safe and handed it back and told her to look after it. Whoever knew, perhaps it would lead the child back one day to her true family? Truth was stranger than fiction.

  “Made it safe? In what way?”

  Maria told Arthur about the cheap tin teddy bear with the head which unscrewed, in which she’d put the pendant.

  “I’ve heard about those,” said Arthur. “But so have all the customs officers in the world. In what way did things turn out well afterwards?”

  She’d finished the left leg. She stretched it and admired its smoothness, and moved on to the right. They were good, strong legs. She said her pimp had been murdered the next day, and she was glad; he’d been a violent, nasty man. Now she was with another, who really cared for her. (She sounded, he thought, like an actress talking about her agent.) If Arthur wanted more than talk, she was perfectly willing. He wouldn’t have to pay extra. Just talk always felt like cheating to her but it was surprising how many men wanted to do it. Arthur declined the offer, with thanks. He paid her an extra hundred francs, so that her good deed would at least be rewarded in this life. He was not sure how she would fare in the next.

  STIRRINGS

  ARTHUR NEXT WENT TO Geneva and made an appointment to see Clifford. He did not think the interview would be easy. Nor was it. Leonardo’s Geneva office overlooked the lake. It had one of the more spectacular views Europe offered, and also one of the highest rents. Clifford, at this busy time, did not like to waste his time on anyone but millionaires; a black insurance-fraud investigator could bring him no profit, only bad memories. ZARA Airlines had recently paid out £40,000 on Nell’s life, which had been split between himself and Helen. Helen had given her share of the money to a charity: more fool her. He told himself it was because she felt guilty. If she had not argued so about the access arrangements, he would not have had to fly the child out in secret and she’d be alive today. Helen’s fault! Like the divorce, like his unhappiness, like everything! With Helen so much to blame, these days he got on very well with his mother. There had been a time when all his dissatisfactions had been laid at the maternal door, but these were forgotten now, and he was a frequent weekend visitor at Dannemore Court, his parents’ place in Sussex. Leonardo’s paid for his frequent flights. The check-in girl at Swissair could be relied upon to provide him with the best possible seat. He had had a short affair with one of the senior girls—painful for her, since she fell in love—but sufficiently well-managed by Clifford that she continued to hope, rather than lapse into hate. It is not a good thing to be hated by the check-in girl of an airline on which you frequently travel. They have friends everywhere.

  “It’s lovely to have you here, darling,” said Cynthia. “But isn’t it terribly expensive? All this to-ing and fro-ing.”

  “Leonardo’s pays,” said Clifford.

  “Do they know it pays?” asked Otto.

  “It gets swallowed up,” said Clifford. Otto sighed. It seemed to him, since Nell’s death, that everything good had gotten swallowed up, in a sea of greed, opportunism and self-interest. The superpowers aimed their hideous weapons at one another and beneath this arch of evil the human race gamboled and played. True, the Nazis no longer stalked the capitals of Europe, but the men he had worked for turned out to be traitors, or worse. Now Nell was gone, and with her the future he had once, by sacrifice, hoped to redeem.

  “Father seems low,” said Clifford to Cynthia.

  “He is,” said Cynthia. “It’s very tiring.” She had written a kind letter to Helen, almost a letter of apology, at the time of the ZOE 05 disaster, and had received one back, short but courteous, acknowledging Cynthia’s loss along with her own. Had not Nell stayed for some months at Dannemore Court, in the nursery which had once been Clifford’s? Did she not too, the paternal grandmother, feel the loss? Should it not be “the death”? Helen had not referred to Nell’s death, only to her loss. It had struck Cynthia as a little strange, but she had not mentioned it to Clifford, for fear of seeing his brow darken and his eyes dull, and he too descend o
nce again into depression. Depression, of course, as Cynthia knew, is anger unrecognized and undeclared. Clifford railed against Helen when he should better have railed against Cynthia; Otto railed against Clifford (in private), but both father and son were angry with fate; with the world. Nell’s death had triggered a sullen melancholy, which the son was better able to throw off than the father. Cynthia diverted herself with an animating affair with an opera singer from, of all places, Cairo, and waited for things to get better. Things did, in her experience.

  But that’s by the by. In the meantime Clifford had no wish to be reminded of Nell. ZARA Airlines had paid up, so why was Arthur Hockney persecuting him?

  Arthur knew better than to suggest to Clifford that he had reason to believe his daughter was alive. He said merely it had come to ZARA Airlines’ attention that perhaps Mr. Blotton, who had accompanied the child, had not been on the aircraft at the time of the crash, but had sent a delegate in his place.

  “Unlikely,” said Clifford, “since I was going to pay him his second half of the fee when he handed the child over. I would hardly have paid it to anyone but him, now would I? These are stupid questions, Mr. Hockney, on a painful theme, and you have no business raising them.”

  “Did Mr. Blotton smoke?” Arthur asked. Clifford seemed taken aback.

  “How can I remember a detail like that, Mr. Hockney? I’m a busy man. You may very well be able to give me a blow-by-blow account of the events of a day more than two years ago—but I certainly can’t. Memories of the past are for those who have no experience in the present. In other words, for those who live dull lives. Good day, Mr. Hockney.”

  “Did he smoke?” persisted Arthur. “It’s important.”

  “Important to you, perhaps. Not to me. But yes, Blotton smoked. He smelled like an old ashtray. I imagine his death on ZOE 05 saved him from a lingering death by lung cancer.”

  And Arthur was dismissed. This was the man that Helen loved, who had lain cozily by her side and then, as it were, pushed her out of bed. All the same, he could not wholly dislike Clifford. Like some wounded, flailing animal, he crashed about in the undergrowth to let you know he was coming—he did not pretend to be nice. An un-English trait. Arthur toyed with the idea of spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars on, say, one of Leonardo’s newly-purchased Magrittes, just to take Clifford aback, to regain face, but sensibly controlled himself. The painting would have been bought for the wrong motives. It would not bring pleasure, it would hang year in year out in a Manhattan apartment—the only wall-space he owned and which he scarcely ever visited—no, it was absurd. Let his enormous salary, his ten percent commission on money saved for clients, which ran into millions, mount undisturbed in the bank.

  Let me explain something to you, reader. Arthur Hockney was an orphan, and felt it. Now you may think: but he’s a grown man, strong, effective, wealthy, why should this fact affect him so? Sooner or later most of us will be orphans, people without parents. But because of the circumstances of his parents’ death, Arthur felt he had no business to be alive—which was perhaps why his work was so closely connected with death, in all its most dramatic forms, and he had a bad conscience—though I myself don’t think he had cause for one. Harry and Martha Hockney had come North in the twenties, shipped from the South to work in the Chicago stockyards, had become politicized in the union struggles at that terrible time, learned to speak on platforms about class, race and union matters; Arthur, as a child, had lived mostly in a Civil Rights cortège. Until one day, when he was seventeen, his parents’ car had been driven off the road—by accident, it was said, but the Civil Rights people knew better—and his parents killed. Arthur had quarreled with his parents that day and refused to go with them. He had a date with a girl, he said. Now that is a hard kind of thing to recover from, and my own view is he never quite did. The Civil Rights people recognized his trauma, consoled him, treated him with every kindness, paid for his college education. I think they saw in Arthur a future leader, the man who would follow in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s footsteps. But Arthur knew he did not have the religious or political convictions his people needed. He did not join them on their marches, on their platforms, and they did not grudge him his freedom or resent his decision. We did all this, they said, for your parents’ sake. Think no more of it. But Arthur did, of course, how could he not? Now he saw himself as a man without race, country or roots; orphaned in every sense of the word. He traveled the world in an attempt to elude his conscience, and sometimes, as he stared at the mangled bodies of the dead, and rejoiced in his own strength and health and good fortune, thought he had managed. One day, he thought, when I find a political or human movement I can totally agree with, they shall have all my money. In the meantime, let it stay in the bank and earn interest.

  Well now, it was apparent to Arthur that Mrs. Blotton had lied, for reasons of her own. Blotton it was who had fallen out of the sky, and lived. Arthur went back to Helen, in London, to inquire about the emerald pendant. Or shall we rather say, reader, that he went back to Helen in London, and inquired about the emerald pendant. Perhaps he should not have done so; not raised Helen’s hopes yet again; but gone straight to Cherbourg in search of Nell, because by the time he did so it was too late—but there, that’s love.

  He visited her at the Muswell Hill house. She asked him over, her voice warm. Simon was away. He was in Helsinki, attending a Summit Conference. She did not add that Janice Best was covering the same Conference. Why should she? She scarcely found it of interest herself. The weather was warm, summer had suddenly dawned out of a chilly spring. He found her sitting in the garden, on a rug, while baby Edward, a fine, stocky, cheerful child, practiced his new walking technique. She was wearing a kind of cream cotton wraparound dress. Her legs were bare, her pretty feet were in sandals, her brown hair tossed and gleamed in the sun. It was cut short and was very curly. But for all her appearance of ease and good nature, he thought she was strained, and thin, and her “Well, well?” too nervous, too quick.

  “What news? Is there any news?”

  He asked her about the pendant. An emerald, perhaps? Had Nell had such a thing? If not necessarily an emerald, something recognizably precious?

  “Nell didn’t wear jewels,” said Helen, shocked. But something occurred to her and she went upstairs to examine her jewel-box and came down weeping—yes, the pendant was gone. It should have been there in the box. It wasn’t. She had never looked at it since before, before—before the aircrash, she meant, but couldn’t say it. She hated it really. Clifford had wanted it back, but had given it to her with such love—yes, it was perfectly possible for Nell to have taken it, but why should she have? She’d been told not to touch the box, there were treasures inside—she stopped.

  “She said, I remember she said, that last morning, could she take a treasure to school for showing—you know what they do—but I was busy—” and Helen wept and wept again, at the failure of mother-love, to get a child to nursery school properly, on the very day you lose her—or indeed, the greater failure of saving her from harm. And perhaps also because now she was frightened; if Nell was indeed alive, what sort of life was it that she had? Anxiety had to take the place of grief, response of nonresponse. And anxiety is just about the most painful emotion a parent can have about a child, enough, sometimes, to make you wish the child had never been born, than do this to you now, make you feel like this.

  Helen wept. Arthur thought she would never stop. Grief for the loss of Nell, for her own childhood, for her marriage to Clifford, for Simon, for the humiliation rendered her by Janice Best, for the wretchedness of everything—all was unlocked and released on that afternoon, as Helen wept and little Edward, without his accustomed audience, fell asleep on the lawn, and was nearly, nearly stung by a wasp on his lip—though no one but you and me, reader, will ever know that!

  ALL CHANGE!

  AND NELL? WHERE WAS Nell while her mother wept and her little half-brother slept? I’ll tell you. She was sitting mute and puzzl
ed in the interview room of an assessment center for disturbed children on the edge of Hackney marshes, only some twelve miles away. This is how it came about.

  Now you might be excused for thinking with Marthe that the devil was after her, having missed his prey the first time. Marthe and the de Troites had certainly done their best, in the course of the black midnight mass, to bring him up from the depths of hell. Or perhaps it was that Marthe was half-mad with shock, guilt and grief, and hadn’t driven for a long time, and certainly wasn’t used to modern traffic, or how to behave on a Route Nationale—which she now found herself upon.

  “Where are we going? What’s happening?” little Nell kept asking from the back of the car. She was still in her nightie. Her head was swimming with shock and fright. It was raining. Headlights blurred in front of Marthe’s rheumy old eyes, her gnarled hands gripped the wheel, and she steered rather than drove, her foot down hard on the accelerator, not that that made much difference to anything. The Deux Chevaux had seen many, many better days. And if the accelerator hardly worked, neither did the brakes, which evened things up. Marthe’s breathing was more like snoring than anything else, but Nell was used to that.

  “Please, let’s stop!” begged Nell. “I’m so frightened!” But Marthe kept on, and the tires ate up the miles. And still the flames leaped in Marthe’s memory, and the sound of the howling which had preceded it echoed in her ears and seemed to be pursuing her. It may, of course, have been merely the sound of the blaring warning horns of other drivers, as they zoomed up to and past the erratically driven, badly lit Deux Chevaux. Who is to say a thing like that?

  Presently Marthe stopped the car. She did not draw off the road, or wait for a turnout, she simply stopped. It was now raining hard and the old windshield-wipers could not keep proper pace. Marthe could not see, she could not go on. She sat and wept for her old exhausted aching bones, for the terror in her mind, for her fear of hellfire, for the poor child in the back of the car. Nell got out and stood by the side of the road in the rain. (She wore her tin teddy bear on a chain around her neck. She always slept with it, and the Marquise had always tried gently to dissuade her from so doing, and had always failed.) The child felt she had to go for help, for poor weeping Marthe, somewhere, somehow, but she was only just six and scarcely knew what to do. So Nell stood, and her hand went up to the comfort of her teddy bear, as it always did when she was forlorn and bereft.