The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  The first five cars that passed saw the Deux Chevaux in time, through the rain and spray, and swerved and carried on. The sixth car was not so lucky. In it were English holiday-makers, on the road south from Cherbourg. They were all tired; the father, who drove, had been drinking. He thought brandy would keep him alert. It did not. The Deux Chevaux loomed. Too late! Crash, bang, silence! Wreckage strewed across the road. Into the back of this car went, after the disastrous manner of these things, a massive petrol-tanker, traveling far faster than it should. It overturned, it burst; fire leaped across the roadway, engulfing cars coming in the opposite direction. Showers of burning gasoline poured down over the wreckage, cars, bodies, everything. The conflagration was immense; it made headlines all over the world. Ten people died, including Marthe who, though mercifully unconscious at the time, perished as her master and mistress had, by fire. The devil—if you care to look at it like this—having done his intended work, having pursued and caught his victim, and careless of how many others he took out of this world with her, retreated and lay quiet for a time.

  And that’s how it happened that little Nell was found wandering, when early morning came, by the side of the road. Shock had rendered her almost speechless. She had a few words of English, and, so far as they could tell, some kind of retrospective amnesia. The wreckage of five cars in all had to be sorted out—three French and two English. How many people had been in which, and why, seventy miles south of Cherbourg on the holiday route, was hard to ascertain. The man from the British Consulate assumed, naturally enough, that the child was from one of the English cars. She called for her mummy, and wept, poor little thing, but was unable to give any information as to her name, or her address, or where she lived. She spoke like a child of three: they thought for a while perhaps she was mentally retarded. Nor did anyone turn up to claim her.

  “I fell out of the sky,” she said once, almost proudly, when asked for the umpteenth time where and how she came to be where she was, and that, of course, to her examiners made no sense at all. To you, dear reader, of course it does. She had. But they were right about the retrospective amnesia. Nell, mercifully, had lost all memory of the fire at the château, the accident on the road, Marthe, and Milord and Milady. But now she was amongst English-speaking people and, helped by language, she could go back further in her mind and recall a few details of her earlier life.

  “I want to see Tuffin,” she said.

  “Tuffin?”

  “Tuffin’s my cat.” Well, whatever else, she was certainly British.

  So it happened that Nell was shipped home to England by courtesy of the British Consulate and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children combined, and put for a time in an assessment home for children run by the Inner-London Education Authority. She had become one of the waifs and strays thrown up all too often by our chaotic and multitudinous society. Many children go missing and are never found, and a great tragedy that is—worse perhaps than any. A few are found that no one seems to have missed. And what becomes of a child with no parents to protect her, no family to guide her, lost as she is in the world of the poor, the helpless and the oppressed? We will see!

  A BURNT-OUT TRAIL

  “A RESPECTABLE MILORD AND Milady from Cherbourg” were the seven words which led Arthur Hockney to be sitting, on a hot October day, in the offices of the Superintendent of Police of that very town, checking the records for just such a pair. Wealthy, titled, and childless until a couple of years back—or perhaps moved suddenly into the area? But none such could the Superintendent bring to mind.

  “It could hardly be the famille de Troite!” he said, running his finger down the electoral roll, and he laughed.

  “Why not?” asked Arthur. “If they’re rich, if they’re titled, as you say they are—?”

  “But they’re older than Methuselah—and hardly the adopting kind,” said the Superintendent.

  “Nevertheless—” Arthur was insistent.

  “Besides which,” said the Superintendent, “they’re dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “The château was consumed by fire only a few weeks back. Not to mention Milord and Milady and an elderly servant too. The people around here say the devil did it, sending a lightning bolt from a clear sky. But it’s been a long hot summer as you know. Old people are careless, and these ones drank a lot of good red wine. I am a rational man, Monsieur Hockney, and do not believe that satanic intervention is the most likely explanation for the burning down of an almost derelict château and the death of its elderly occupants!”

  Arthur refrained from saying that in his experience when it came to strange events, the most likely explanation was seldom the right one, and made a journey to the site where the château had stood.

  He found it a peculiarly gloomy place; it had the odd, sad atmosphere that the scene of a tragedy so often does, but some-thing more as well: a sense of menace, of something nasty left unfinished. He shivered. It was strange. He’d felt this before—in places where terrorist bombs had exploded, or bridges had collapsed, or liners run aground with great loss of life—but it was not usually present at the sites of simple domestic tragedy, on the minor scale. Arthur stayed around a little, poking amongst the dust and ash and rubble, and came across a bright length of yellow ribbon, the kind that would tie a child’s hair.

  “Well, well!” said Arthur, and stopped to pick it up and, as he did so, a ray of sun pierced through the gloomy trees into the clearing where he stood. It had the effect of a smile; motes danced in the air. A butterfly fluttered past. Arthur’s spirits lifted. That was all it took. He was sure of two things. That Nell had indeed been here, and that she was still alive. The sun went in, the gloom and sense of menace returned, and Arthur left.

  Further inquiries in Paris and Cherbourg led nowhere. Nell had vanished again. He now doubted she would ever be found. He told ZARA Airlines to close their file; if Blotton did reappear to claim his fortune, it would hardly be worth the trouble of reclaiming what was left of it. And no doubt Blotton would meet his comeuppance presently, if he hadn’t already. If lung cancer didn’t carry him off, no doubt one or the other of his criminal acquaintances would. He moved in very nasty circles” indeed.

  SURPRISE! SURPRISE!

  READER, DO YOU HATE surprises? I do. I like to know what’s coming next. The very thought of a surprise birthday party sends shivers up my spine. I’m bound to be wearing my oldest dress and not have washed my hair for a week. Clifford, on his forty-first birthday, had a surprise telephone call from Angie Wellbrook, and didn’t like that one bit. The phone call wasn’t a nice surprise for Elise O’Malley, either. She was the pretty young Irish novelist currently keeping Clifford company, and she really thought—rash thing!—she had him nailed. That is to say, Clifford kept talking about how he’d like to have children, and Elise took that to mean he saw her as their mother—which surely must entail marriage. Elise had given up a literary career in Dublin to be with Clifford in Geneva.

  Another surprise for Clifford that very day was finding a gray hair in the thick blond thatch which was in those days his trademark—his hair is completely white today, of course, though still thick (and he is, to my mind, no less attractive now than then. But then we all get older, pace by pace, including me). As the decades turned from the sixties to the seventies, Clifford had approached and passed forty and was frightened, and fighting off the inevitability of being no longer young (which was of course why he kept talking about children. Men will have their immortality, one way or another), and the single gray hair, wiry, tough and lifeless as it was, did nothing to help. And then the phone call from Angie.

  Clifford and Elise were in bed; Clifford reached out a muscular hand for the receiver. He had a deep reddish-brown suntan and very thick fair hair on his arms. Extraordinary! Just to look at them made Elise shivery with excitement and a sense of sin. The suntan was so jet-setty and civilized: the hair so primitive! Elise was a Catholic; it was ages since she’d been to confes
sion, let alone written a novel. She’d started one recently—about love—and shown it to Clifford, but he’d just laughed and said, “I don’t really think so, Elise! Stick to what you know.” So she’d put it to one side. Elise insisted on having pure white cotton sheets on their bed. They made her feel less sinful. And besides, her own vivid red hair and bright blue eyes looked well against white; making her, she thought, seem somehow vulnerable and above all marriageable. Enough about Elise, reader. You get the picture. The girl’s both an innocent and an idiot.

  This is what Angie had to say on the phone to Clifford.

  “Darling, Daddy’s dead. Yes, I am very upset. Though lately he’d been getting quite senile. I am now the majority shareholder in Leonardo’s.”

  “Angie, sweetheart,” said Clifford, cautiously, “I don’t think that can be quite true.”

  “It is, darling,” said Angie, “because I’ve bought out old Larry Patt’s shares, and Sylvester Steinberg’s. You know I’ve been with Sylvester for the last couple of years?”

  “I had heard something of the kind.” He had indeed heard about it, and had been both surprised and relieved. Sylvester Steinberg was one of those art critics who, by judicious use of the art journals and learned essays on this painter and that, manipulate the art market. He functioned mostly from New York. Such people work very simply, if discreetly. They buy a canvas by an unknown painter for, say, two hundred pounds, and by the end of the year have created, through their criticism, such an interest in and furor about that particular painter’s work that any single example will fetch at least two thousand pounds. And five years later twenty thousand pounds. And so on. Lucky old painter, you might think—except not, in truth. If he (or rarely, she) ended up with twenty-five percent of what his paintings are sold for, first time around, he’s lucky. And of course whenever it changes hands after that, he gets nothing. This was one of the reasons Helen’s father, John Lally, was in such a state of enduring fury about Clifford Wexford. Moreover, Clifford was not above manipulating the market himself. Eight major Lallys had gone back into Leonardo’s London vaults, waiting for the day they’d fetch a fortune. They did no good on Clifford’s Geneva walls—the Swiss simply hated them, as did the kind of rich expatriate who turned up in the gallery there. They liked names they knew—from Rembrandt to Picasso, and major stops in between. Not minor, or later.

  I must hasten to say in Clifford’s defense that at least his own taste is genuine, and not dependent upon monetary value. He knows when a painting is good. And even in the Art World, excellence somehow survives, and rises to the surface, above all the murky scum of wheeling and dealing. Nevertheless, John Lally wanted his paintings on walls, not in bank vaults. He wanted them looked at. He had long ago given up hope of making money from them! Bitter! If only creativity and money could be separated. But it can’t, if only because each artist—be he (she) painter, writer, poet, composer—anyone who makes something where nothing was before, provides occupation and profit for so many others. Just as the criminal supports on his angry shoulders a whole army of policemen, sociologists, magistrates, governors, jailers, prison officials, journalists, commentators, reform societies, Ministers of State and so on—all dependent upon his ability to perform a criminal act—so does each act of artistic creation support publishers, critics, libraries, galleries, theaters, concert halls, actors, printers, framers, musicians, ushers, janitors, academics, arts councils, the organizers of international cultural exchanges, art administrators, Ministers of the Arts and so forth—and the weight can seem excessive, the rewards astonishingly little, and society’s expectation that the artist will do it for free (or just enough to keep him alive and still producing) for sheer abstract love of form, beauty, Art, oh Art—while those who are parasitical upon the artist will command high salaries, higher status—oh intolerable, extraordinary! Or so it seemed to John Lally (and so it seems to me, I must confess). But enough of all that art-schmart stuff. Back to Angie’s life since last we saw her, and her phone call to Clifford. Now Clifford knew well enough that Angie was a manipulative and dangerous woman, and that a phone call from her meant trouble, but he was bored.

  “Are you and Sylvester actually married?” Clifford asked, casually. Elise, in the bed beside him, was tense. Some overheard telephone conversations, you can just tell, are going to change your life and not for the better.

  “Darling Clifford,” said Angie, “you know I will never marry anyone else but you.”

  “I’m flattered,” said Clifford.

  “And you think the same about me,” said Angie, “or why aren’t you married yourself?”

  “I’ve never met the right woman,” he said, working hard at keeping the whole conversation a joke. It wasn’t a nice thing for poor Elise to overhear, and worse, looking at Elise lying there, her hair so carefully arranged in its reddish cloud, self-conscious and reproachful both at once, Clifford felt a great surge of irritation with himself and Elise. What was she doing in his bed? Where was Helen? What had happened between him and Helen, those years ago, to have brought him to this? She was the woman who ought to be in the bed, and a proper marital bed at that.

  “Clifford,” said Angie, “are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you would be,” said Angie. “Shall we meet at Claridges on Thursday? Lunch? Or maybe breakfast? I still have the suite there. Remember?”

  Clifford did. He also remembered that Angie had always been the bearer of bad news regarding Helen—driving in the wedges which were to split the marriage asunder.

  “And how is Helen? Lost to suburbia, I hear. Well, she always was dull.”

  “I don’t know how she is,” said Clifford, truthfully. “Why don’t you come to Geneva and see me here?”

  “Because you’re bound to be with some idiot girl who’ll get in the way,” said Angie. She was wearing a cream silk negligee for the purpose of this phone call. It had cost £799, for reasons known only to the fashion house which contrived it, if not to me. But it did make her feel confident. Wouldn’t it you? (It would me.) Perhaps, to a millionairess, the £799 was well spent.

  “And besides,” said Angie, “now I have all these shares in Leonardo’s, I’m awfully busy. It might be sensible to close down the Geneva branch, I think it’s seen its day, don’t you? You’ve swamped the market with your boring Old Masters, and Switzerland’s awash with them. They’re beginning to lose value. And Clifford, all the fun is in contemporary art. You should see what Sylvester gets up to.”

  “I’d rather not,” he said.

  Her father was dead. Somehow she felt entitled to have fun, and part of her fun was to make trouble for Clifford. So there he was at Claridges that Thursday, and Elise, weeping, was on her way back to Dublin.

  “It’s not that I’m tired of you, Elise,” Clifford said. “Who could ever be tired of someone so sweet and fresh as you? It’s just I think this thing has run its course, don’t you?”

  CHICKENS HOME TO ROOST!

  THOSE OF YOU WHO have been paying good attention will have seen how Clifford, in the name of love, deals out misery and disillusion to the women in his life—and though you may feel these women deserve no better, it is certain that Clifford is not happy either. Give him a little of your sympathy! Clifford seems to have gotten caught up in some cosmic game of pass-the-parcel, and the parcel goes around the circle, and at the heart of the parcel is not the little nugget of joy, peace and permanence everyone hopes for, but a vial of very ordinary tears. The music stops, the parcel’s yours, there’s luscious wrapping-paper everywhere, but somehow nothing, nothing else—and then the music starts again—and Harry whom you love now loves Samantha who loves Peter who loves Harry; you know how it is!—and on the tearful parcel goes.

  Clifford was due to see Angie Wellbrook for breakfast on Thursday, at Claridges. That is to say, she proposed a nine-thirty meeting there. It was the fashion in the seventies to have these breakfast-meetings in hotels. It seemed to demonstrate just how bu
sy and affaire everyone was—though there was seldom any actual breakfast, and the coffee, wrung out of the night staff just as they gave way to Room Service, was usually cold and old. Clifford flew in from Geneva on Wednesday morning and spent Wednesday afternoon at the head office in meetings and on the phone. The situation was much as he feared: Angie was now indubitably powerful as a shareholder, and not prepared to be a sleeping partner but wishing to interfere—actually to question the taste and wisdom of Leonardo’s directors. A nuisance! The London gallery had finally achieved a profitable balance between contemporary painters and Old Masters—leaving the mid-period painters—Impressionists, pre-Raphaelites, Surrealists, and so forth—pretty much alone. The wisdom of this policy Angie was thought to be now challenging—not unreasonably, for it was true the mid-period market was increasingly buoyant. But she was also an opponent of Leonardo’s practice of mounting enormously prestigious—though not always profitable—public exhibitions. The Board, led by Clifford, felt that any financial loss was more than compensated for in the preservation of Leonardo’s image as a semi-public body of irrefutable integrity, and that the exhibitions must stay.

  Clifford also had tea with Sir Larry Patt, now living in dusky splendor in the Albany. Yes, Sir Larry Patt had sold his shares to Angie. Why did he ask? Sir Larry had whiskey, not tea, with his cucumber sandwiches. His wife Rowena had left him a year back, for a man half her age.