by Fay Weldon
In the meantime, there was reading, writing, tables, friends, talk and play at school. The rediscovery of a calm yet eventful world. She was shy, quiet and good at first.
“What a bright little girl,” said Miss Payne, her teacher, to Polly. “What a credit to you!” and Polly beamed. She became naughtier and livelier as time went on, of course. Never nasty, never ganging up, never one of the tormentors, or the tormented; the peacemaker, whose friend everyone wanted to be. School was fun, and simple, and she could see it was the way forward. She had a little pocket-radio—not cheap, no, fallen off the back of a truck, given to her by one of Clive’s friends—and sometimes she’d listen to the talk shows and puzzle over them, and try to work out what was going on in the outside world; not easy at all! When she’d had enough she’d turn to the music program and listen to songs. There was no television at Faraway Farm, not from principle, but because reception was so bad on account of the hills; all you could ever get was a fuzz. So she read, and talked, and skipped, and drew, and presently was happy.
Clive and Polly were excused a good deal on Nell’s account. If they could produce so pleasant a child, they couldn’t be too bad. And she was talented, too. She did the painting competition on the back of the Weetabix box when she was nine, and came in first in the Under-Tens.
But there, we’re running ahead of ourselves. That’s something to come, something to look forward to. For the time being, reader, we will leave Nell safely and happily at Faraway Farm, growing nicely, if haphazardly cared for.
BAD NIGHTS
LET’S TURN OUR ATTENTION back to Arthur Hockney, whom we last saw baby-sitting for Helen, on the night she didn’t come home. Arthur Hockney had spent many wretched nights in his life, of course! This is the fate of the insurance investigator. He had all but frozen in the Antarctic on the site of an aircrash, been practically frightened to death by sharks on a minute coral island where a tanker had been scuttled, been tortured almost out of his wits by the gang who’d kidnapped Shergar. But if you asked him what the worse night of his life was (barring the night his parents died) he’d have said, simply, The night I baby-sat for Helen Cornbrook, and she didn’t come home.
What unrequited love can do to a man! Did Helen know Arthur loved her? Probably, though he’d never said so. The relationship between them was professional: she employed Arthur to search for Nell. All the same (unless they’re your divorce solicitor) it is useful to have your employees in love with you. They charge less and work harder, though they sometimes, it’s true, abruptly hand in their notice for no apparent reason.
And of course there was the sheer surprise of it. Helen, during the years when all but she and Arthur believed Nell was dead, had said many a harsh and unkind word about Clifford. If you have lost a man’s love, even if by reason of your own faithless nature, it is only natural for you to practice despising and hating him, to make the loss seem not so important. It is the business of saving face, and lessening the grief, I am sure, which makes divorced people so virulent about and spiteful to each other, to the distress and shock of their friends. Helen was no exception, and Arthur, though well-versed in the ways of criminals, in the minds of men who will cheat, lie and kill for their own profit and advancement, knew next to nothing about the heart of a woman. How a woman who hates and insults a man one week can be loving and admiring him the next. Amazing!
The evening Arthur came to visit Helen to report his progress in the search for Nell, and found her second husband Simon away, and the phone rang out of the blue and it was Clifford, asking Helen out to dinner, he did not expect her to say yes. He did not expect her to ask him to baby-sit, let alone to find himself saying “yes.”
He did not expect her to stay out all night. He did not expect to be so distressed and angry and jealous as the hours ticked away. He did not expect the pain in his chest, which he thought at first must be illness but presently realized was the effect of a broken heart. He felt not just wretched, but a fool as well. Indeed, it was the worst night of his life. And then, when it became apparent that Helen was going to remarry Clifford, actually remarry the man who had caused her so much distress, he vowed to give up the Nell Wexford case, place it in its special “lost child” file.
And yet. And yet. Forget Helen, forget Clifford, forget his own emotions—here there was still a mystery, and it was in Arthur’s nature to solve mysteries. One day, on impulse, he went once more to visit Mrs. Blotton. Three years now since the two million pounds compensation had been paid. Over four years since the accident which had allegedly killed Erich Blotton and little Nell. Time enough, thought Arthur Hockney, for Erich Blotton to believe he could safely return from the dead, if that had been his intention.
Mrs. Blotton was living in the same small, safe house in the same tree-lined suburban road (its numbers ran to 208) as she had before her windfall. She was wearing, Arthur could swear, the same old tweed skirt and thin red jumper as when he’d seen her four years earlier. She was as thin, plain and nervous as ever. He couldn’t tell, as ever, whether her nervousness sprang from guilt, or from the fact that he, Arthur, was so black.
“You again!” she said, but she let him into her neat, shabby front room. “What do you want? My husband’s dead and gone. And even if he were alive, why should he come back to me?”
“Because of the money,” said Arthur.
She laughed a thin little laugh.
“Oh yes,” she said, “if money could fetch anyone back from the grave, it would be Erich Blotton. But there isn’t much left. I see to that. I give it away. In dribs and drabs to make it last. It’s my occupation. It gets me out of the house.”
“You have a kind heart,” he said.
That pleased her. She made him a cup of tea.
“You blacks!” she said. “Taking over! You’re everywhere now. Up and down this very street. Well, you can get used to anything.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Nothing personal,” she said.
“Never is,” he said, though his parents would be ashamed of him, that he should grit his teeth against insult, and do nothing to change or improve the world. The truth was, and he knew it, that he, a brave man in the physical sense, was a moral coward. Put him before a maddened criminal trying to drive an ax into his head and he functioned; put him on a platform and ask him to address a public meeting, and his heart beat hard, his hands trembled, and his tongue was tied. He disgraced himself and the cause he espoused. Faced with Mrs. Blotton’s racism, born of stupidity, neuroses, and ignorance, he did nothing to persuade or educate her, and was ashamed of himself.
Mrs. Blotton, in the meantime, volunteered the fact that she gave the money to children’s homes. She’d always been upset at what her husband did for a living, but what could she do? A wife’s loyalty was to her husband. But all the same—child-snatching! Mostly for fathers, because it was the fathers who had the money, while the mothers had the children. However, that was all over now. She was glad to have a visitor, even one like Arthur. It wasn’t often she had the chance to chat. To be frank, she was quite lonely. Just the cat. And not much of a cat either. Scraggy, gutter-thing. She’d have bought a Persian with some of the money, only the neighbors would have stolen it and skinned it and turned it into stew and sold the skin.
“Why don’t you leave, go to the South of France, live it up a little? You’re a millionaire.”
“Hush!” She hated the word; she was terrified of being robbed. And how could she possibly get to the South of France? What would she do when got there? And who with? She didn’t make friends easily. No, better just stay quiet and give the money away. Besides, she didn’t want to leave the house empty; someone would only break in and mess it up. She lay awake at night, thinking about it, thinking of what her husband had done. Of course he was dead. He’s been paid out for smoking. What was smoking but suicide? Well, God had gotten in there first. And for snatching the little Wexford girl. What was her name? Nell? Now there was a real tragedy. She’d like to ad
opt a little girl, but who would let her? A middle-aged widow! Or even try fostering. She’d like to make amends.
She’d come across a child in one of the Assessment Centers who’d really taken her fancy. Ellen Root. About the same age as the Wexford child. Not much to look at; they kept shaving her head. She’d asked if she could take her home, but they wouldn’t let her. The child was backward, so they said. She didn’t believe it. She knew French when she heard it. They, being ignorant, just thought the child was babbling.
“French?” asked Arthur. “She was speaking French? Where is she now?”
“She’s disappeared,” said Mrs. Blotton, and Arthur thought, “That’s it! That’s her!” inasmuch as a child who disappears once, twice, will disappear thrice. It’s a kind of life habit, a tendency, if you like. But Ellen Root? Eleanor Wexford became Ellen Root? It was unthinkable!
“For a black man,” said Mrs. Blotton, “you’re not so bad. Do you smoke?”
“No,” said Arthur.
“Well,” said Mrs. Blotton, forgivingly, “that’s something. I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.”
“I daresay it does, Mrs. Blotton.”
To his surprise, she shook his hand when he left, and smiled, and he saw she had a sort of charm. Perhaps his parents would not think too badly of him, for his way of life. The notion that he should follow in their footsteps, he suddenly saw, had been his, rather than theirs: a product of his guilt, that he should be alive, and they so suddenly and violently dead. He could never bring their murderers to justice, yet his life’s work lay in the righting of wrongs. That was surely enough. He left No. 208 with a livelier step and a lighter heart, noticing that even here, down this bleak suburban road, birds sang in the bushes, and roses burgeoned, and cats sat on windowsills and stared, with round judgmental eyes which, for once, seemed to approve and not condemn.
PATTERNS OF GUILT
ARTHUR HOCKNEY LEFT MRS. Blotton and went forthwith to see the Eastlake Assessment Center.
He found a low modern building in concrete and glass, the concrete stained with damp and graffiti, and the glass dirty and in places broken. The Center was fairly new, but it had had time to become dilapidated, in that peculiarly sad way that neglected modern buildings have, as if longing to return as quickly as possible to the raw material from which they so ill-judgedly sprang.
Arthur knocked on the peeling door. He heard no sound of children at play, no laughter. He wondered why. Mrs. Blotton had referred to Ellen Root as having her head shaved. Who, in this day and age, shaved the heads of little girls?
The door was eventually opened by a young woman of half Chinese, half (as he was to discover later) Welsh descent. She was, Arthur thought, strikingly pretty. An overweight Doberman walked affectionately at her heels, and from the pocket of her green smock—which did a great deal for her green slanty eyes—she would take the occasional Marrow Bone Snack and casually feed the beast.
“We’re closed,” said Sarah Dobey, not unappreciative of Arthur’s own black good looks, “and not a moment too soon. Which agency are you from? Animal Rights, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Child Abuse, Fraud Squad, Hornby Electrics? We’ve had them all.” Arthur explained his business over dinner that evening. (Sometimes very pretty, very bright, too clever young girls are without boyfriends. What young man can stand the pace? Takes an older, more worldly man and they’re so often married or otherwise unavailable.) The Doberman went too, and curled up good as gold beneath the table, accepting scraps of Sarah’s vegetable pie and Arthur’s steak. Sarah was a vegetarian.
“Ellen Root?” Sarah exclaimed. “But that was the child who started the whole thing off!”
“Started what off?”
“The scandal! Of course they hushed it up as much as they could. It never got into the papers.”
And she told him what had happened. She, Sarah Dobey, had been working as a clerk in the local Welfare Office. (She was over qualified, of course, with her Master’s Degree in Philosophy, but who would employ her as a philosopher? Someone who looked like her? Look at her! Annabel Lee, housemother at Eastlake, had reported a child missing, apparently run away. A police search had altogether failed to find her. The Welfare Office, disturbed for some time by reports filtering through from Eastlake, sent Sarah in as a domestic, to see just what was going on.
“You can always tell a white woman’s character,” said Sarah, “from her behavior toward the cleaning staff, especially if that cleaning staff is what she would call black, brown or yellow and, I tell you, Annabel Lee’s character was bad, bad, bad! She covered up well for officials but, being the maid, I soon discovered that she bullied and tormented the children, kept the dogs underfed and locked up, and as for the housefather, although well-versed in child-care-and-development jargon, he was a toy-train enthusiast, and either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on, so long as he collected his salary and added to his collection.”
She, Sarah Dobey, had made her report, mailed it, and that very night, not knowing much about animals, but upset by their howling, had opened the door of the compound, and they’d leaped out. She hadn’t expected it. Annabel Lee had stumbled downstairs, to see what was going on, the dogs had jumped at her, and she had for some reason taken fright and fled across the marshes, pursued by the two animals—(“They only wanted to be taken for a walk!” said Sarah. “Poor things!”)—onto the roadway, where she had been hit by a passing truck, flung into the fast lane, and killed.
“I wish I could feel sorry,” said Sarah, “inasmuch as I daresay it was all my fault. I know I ought to, but somehow I can’t. I think it’s my Degree in Philosophy. It gives me a kind of perspective. Perhaps I need treatment?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Horace Lee had seemed more upset about having to dismantle his train set—for the Home was closed and the children, to their relief, dispersed—than about the death of Annabel Lee or the loss of his job.
“None so strange as folk,” sighed Sarah (who sometimes enjoyed using the vernacular as a relief from her usual measured spoken prose) and Arthur agreed. Oddly, he thought, there was something of Helen in Sarah—the high cheekbones, the limpid look—only in Sarah it was the look of the optimist, not the pessimist; someone who sees the answer in action, not in submission.
Anyway, Sarah had stayed on to supervise the closure and dismantling of Eastlake. She’d found a good home for one of the dogs, Kettle, but not for the other, now under the table, the one named Kim. But she didn’t know much about dogs, and couldn’t keep the animal for long.
“You might be overfeeding it,” said Arthur cautiously, and nudged the animal with his foot, and Kim looked up at him. “On the other hand,” added Arthur, “it’s just as well to keep this kind of dog happy.” He had a feeling the Eastlake dogs had taken justice into their own hands. These things happen. He raised his eyebrows at the dog, and Kim blinked back and laid his head on Arthur’s shoe.
“Well,” said Arthur, “I’ll be Kim’s guardian. He’ll need retraining and getting back into condition. I have friends who keep kennels on the Welsh border.”
And of course Sarah had relatives there and one way and another the connections between them crossed and recrossed and knotted themselves in the most thorough and satisfactory way. Which was, I think, the reward for Arthur’s steadfastness and resolution in relation to Nell, and for staying all night babysitting for Helen’s Edward, when another man in similar circumstances might simply have walked out. Good deeds get rewards sooner or later, though in unexpected ways.
Ellen Root, Sarah discovered, had disappeared on the night of the great Montdragon antiques robbery. It was known they’d taken the roadway. The whole episode had been peculiar. Ellen Root was a child without a history, an English child picked up wandering on a French roadway and now she was gone, as if she had never been.
“At least,” said Sarah, “she had the guts and sense to run! No one else did. And it was because she
ran that Eastlake was closed, and not a moment too soon.”
“If the police couldn’t find her,” said Arthur, “I daresay it was because the villains did! Find them, find her.” He felt he knew by now the pattern of Nell’s fate. He had an instinct for these things and, of course, reader, as you know, he was right. Nell had gone into hiding, along with the stolen Chippendale bookcase.
Kim stretched up and licked his hand, and Arthur felt, suddenly and unexpectedly, that wherever Nell was, she was well and happy, and the dog somehow linked to her fortune, and his, and all he had to do was love Sarah and look after the dog, and one day, one day, fate would bring Nell to him. Life can change so suddenly for the better, reader. If you only forgive yourself, and allow yourself to be happy.
ADMIRING ART
“WHAT ON EARTH IS in here?” asked Angie of Clifford, staring into the River Gallery at Leonardo’s, a long narrow room, newly opened, overlooking the Thames, its beautifully lit walls lined with what to her looked like a series of ragged scrawls.
“Children’s art,” said Clifford, shortly. She was on a flying visit. He was about to be the father of twins. Helen drifted around the Orme Square house, happy and languid and secure, barefooted and vast, somehow, gratifyingly, all his own doing. Being pregnant with twins is not usually easy, but Helen was relaxed and content, and only occasionally sighed and groaned. He would be with her in the hospital. Of course he would. If you lose one child, you don’t want to miss a moment of the next, even though it comes in the form of a double helping.
“What on earth,” asked Angie, “is Leonardo’s doing with children’s art?”
“Exhibiting it,” said Clifford as Angie tucked her arm in his. On her finger was a diamond ring the size of a plum. “Weetabix is sponsoring a children’s art exhibition. They asked us if they could use the new gallery. We said yes.”
“Good God,” she said. “Why? Where’s the profit in it?”
