The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  She also said, “Clifford, I’m pregnant. I’m having your baby!” He did not dare suggest an abortion. Even the old Clifford might have demurred, so steely and glittery was Angie’s eye. As for the new Clifford, he did not like the thought of life, any life, destroyed. He had become accountably soft, even nice. Reader, if only he hadn’t been so greedy; if only gold and money hadn’t so appealed; if only Cynthia had loved him better and filled up the bucket of his need—if only! What use are “if only’s.” Still, they’re interesting.

  The other thing Angie said was, “Of course, Clifford, if you and I joined our Empires together we’d rule the world.” (The Art World, I can only suppose she meant. At least I hope so.)

  “How do you mean, Angie? Join our Empires?”

  “Marry me, Clifford.”

  “Angie, I’m married to Helen.”

  “More fool you,” said Angie, and told Clifford about Helen’s affair (alleged) with Arthur Hockney, the black New York detective Helen had employed to search for little Nell in the dreadful days after the child’s disappearance. You and I know, reader, that though Arthur was for many years hopelessly in love with Helen, there was nothing between them, nothing, and he was now happily with his Sarah, and had even, with her help, lately stood upon a platform and spoken at a Fund-raising for Black Artists in Winnipeg. And Angie knew it, but Angie was never one to let truth stand between her and what she wanted.

  “I don’t believe you!” said Clifford.

  “She told me all about it once,” said Angie, “when she was drunk. Some women are like that. Indiscreet when drunk. As Helen is quite frequently. So I expect all London knows. If she’ll tell me, she’ll tell anyone.”

  And it was quite true that Helen did sometimes drink too much, and that Clifford hated it when she did, and so Angie’s mischief-making was the more effective. Helen was one of those unfortunate (or fortunate, if you like) few people upon whom a teaspoon of wine acts as does a tumblerful of gin on others. And you know what cocktail parties are, and art openings—and trays of glasses being handed around, and what with the noise and the excitement and the pleasure of being all dressed up and ravishingly beautiful—as Helen indubitably still was; each extra child seemed to add glamour, not inches—sometimes her hand strayed to the wine instead of the orange juice—oh you know how it is, reader!

  And, reader, one way and another, before three months were out, with Angie’s help, Clifford had stifled his grief and turned it into anger and spite, and the divorce was underway.

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  ANGIE LET IT BE known that she expected Clifford to marry her. He thought he would, inasmuch as now he had lost Helen it scarcely mattered what he did, and Leonardo’s was important, and work the only area in which, it now and tragically seemed, he was successful. Even his own mother was against him. (Clifford, in other words, was low, very low.) He might as well marry Angie. Now these are not the terms on which you and I, reader, would consent to be married, but Angie was different. The rich are different. They expect to get what they want, and usually do. Pride somehow doesn’t enter into it. I won’t say they’re happier for it—it’s just that the rich somehow contrive not to develop too much capacity for unhappiness.

  And besides, Angie’s baby was on the way, and since he had lost Nell, the apple of his eye, Clifford understood, as too few men do, the blessing a child, any child, bestows upon its parents.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Clifford.

  Such a marriage, of course, would present Clifford with many material advantages, as Angie let it be known. The understanding, delicately put, was that when Angie stopped being Wellbrook and became Wexford, Ottoline’s would amalgamate with Leonardo’s, and Angie would prevail upon John Lally, again, to restrict his output of paintings to maximize the Lally market, to everyone’s benefit (except, of course, the artist’s). She would also stop stirring things up in the Colonies (as she liked to call them) and keep the Johannesburg gallery bidding in a lively fashion for those Old Masters increasingly unpopular in the sophisticated European markets. In return she could start a similar Australian branch and call it Ottoline’s, not Leonardo’s—the difference between the two houses now being only in name. And Clifford could visit the twins and they could even come to stay, so long as he didn’t see Helen.

  “Let Simon visit them,” said Clifford. “He’s their father,” and started counter-divorce proceedings, and won.

  Helen wept, and wept, and no one could comfort her, though many tried. This wasn’t what she’d meant, no, not at all.

  Presently she went home to Applecore Cottage to weep some more; this time she had three children with her.

  “I told you so,” said John Lally, only once.

  “Don’t say that to her,” said Marjorie, so he didn’t. The cottage was crowded with so many in it, and Marjorie was of course pregnant. He retired to the woodshed.

  “I’m such a nuisance,” said Helen. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re more than welcome,” said Marjorie. “I know I can never take your mother’s place; I know you must resent the baby—”

  “No, no—” said Helen, and suddenly didn’t. It was impossible not to like Marjorie, who made her father happy. He had taken to painting furniture in his spare time. Ordinary kitchen chairs glowed and fluttered with flowers and birds.

  “What am I going to do with my life?” asked Helen. “I’ve made such a mess of it.” Another robin—how many bird generations since the first—hopped red-breasted in the garden outside and made her smile. She couldn’t indulge her grief; she had the children to think about now.

  “That’s because you depend upon other people,” said Marjorie. “Learn to depend upon yourself.”

  “I’m too old to change,” said Helen, looking no more than eighteen. Marjorie laughed, and Marcus, Max and Edward swarmed into the kitchen, demanding food. They were expensive children. They were used to drinking orange juice, when previous generations had drunk water. You know how it is with today’s children.

  “I do so hate having to ask Clifford for money,” said Helen. “It’s like the old days. I can’t bear it.”

  “Then earn it yourself,” said Marjorie, briskly. “You have every advantage.” And of course, when she came to think of it, Helen had.

  MARRIED TO ANGIE

  ANGIE SAID TO CLIFFORD when finally the decree was through and her little baby Barbara already born—“I know, we’ll be married on Christmas Day.”

  “No,” said Clifford.

  “Why not?”

  “Because that was Nell’s birthday,” he said.

  “Who’s Nell?” Angie asked, honestly forgetting for the moment, and Clifford as near as dammit didn’t marry her, even after all that. Angie had been on her very best behavior lately, of course, but even so in the space of three months had hired and fired as many servants. Clifford could now see that what passed, if you were kind, as sparkiness and forthrightness, was in fact willfulness and rudeness, and that Angie was as bad-tempered as Helen was good—but on the other hand she wasn’t likely to betray him with other men, was she? Let alone ask former husbands to Christmas dinner; let alone be vague, forgetful and always late for appointments. No. The Wellbrook/Wexford marriage was highly suitable and six gold mines came with it and a great many very valuable paintings from the Wellbrook Collection—and Clifford soon overcame his doubts.

  But at least the wedding wasn’t on Christmas Day. It took place on the first Saturday in January, and a very damp, windy day it was too, which blew Angie’s hair quite out of curl, and made her large nose red and noticeable, and you and I know, reader, that Angie needs all the help from the Beauty Salon she can get. The weathered look just didn’t suit her one bit; or the white dress she insisted on wearing. It was a kind of unkind bluey white, not the yellowy white which flatters, and it was too frilly; brides often lose their dress-sense on their wedding day and Angie was no exception. Some things money doesn’t help. Clifford, standing beside her, remembered Helen�
�s fragile, gentle beauty, and almost failed to say “I will.” But Angie nudged him. He said it. That was that.

  Clifford and Angie lived sometimes in Belgravia (a leasehold house of spectacular grandeur, with overlarge rooms just right for paintings but terrible for human beings) and sometimes in Manhattan (a penthouse overlooking Central Park, so burglar-proof it took ten minutes to get inside). A series of Norland nannies had total charge of little Barbara.

  Barbara would stay behind in the Belgravia nursery annex when her parents were in New York. Angie said New York wasn’t safe for children, but Clifford knew she just didn’t want the child around. The pregnancy had served its purpose: the living child was neither here nor there. Clifford made as much of Barbara as he could—but he was busy; there was never enough time. She was a quiet, docile little girl, who stayed too quiet, too docile. The new Wexford friends were smart, middle-aged and boring. Angie had no time for writers, artists or eccentrics, at least for now, though later she’d stray far further. And so Clifford was bored and wretched, and serve him right. It may have been Clifford’s unhappiness, in fact, which led him to sail so close to the law in his dealings with Leonardo’s (New York) in the fourth year of his marriage to Angie.

  CHILD AND MOTHER

  THAT WAS THE YEAR Nell, settled happily enough with the Kildares at the Border Kennels, took her O levels. Art, History, Geography, English, Math, General Science, Religious Knowledge, Needlework, Rural Studies, French. She was good at everything except Math, and particularly good at French. “You speak it almost like a native!” remarked her teacher. You and I, faithful reader, know the reason for that, even though Nell herself had forgotten. These days she seldom thinks back to the days before her arrival in Ruellyn, being at an age when she liked to live in the present, and let the past and future look after themselves.

  She was interested in a boy called Dai Evans, who was too awed by her interest to do much about it. She was altogether too stunning for any ordinary classroom, what with her thick curly blonde hair (that early head-shaving in the Children’s Home must have done it a lot of good, or so my hairdresser says), straight nose, full lips, quick bright eyes and slow, lovely, female smile.

  And what of her half-brother Edward, and her two full brothers, Max and Marcus? Reader, who was it who said that the children of lovers are orphans? Helen, deprived once again, by fortune and Angie, of Clifford, her one undying, permanent love, turned her attention toward her children and they were the better for it. Edward was twelve by now, and the twins Max and Marcus were eight. Three boys! And she had a half-sister too; Clifford and Angie’s daughter, Barbara. On the day of Barbara’s birth, Helen had thought she’d actually die from pain, grief and jealousy, so bad the feelings had been. Now no one in the world should hate a baby, let alone so docile a one as Barbara, and Helen knew it, but she did. She couldn’t help it. The baby had stolen Clifford from her, and left her and her children desolate. She tried to explain this to Marjorie.

  “I blame the baby,” said Helen, “for everything that’s happened.”

  “It’s hardly reasonable,” said Marjorie, the most reasonable of all people. Her baby was called Julian; another boy for the family. Helen’s little half-brother, Nell’s uncle. Fancy!

  “And why should she have a girl?” demanded Helen. “It isn’t fair. The devil’s on her side.”

  “But you had a girl,” said Marjorie. “You had Nell.”

  For a moment Helen hated her stepmother for daring to mention her child, but only for a moment.

  “The anger inside me is so mixed up,” she said presently, “I hardly know where to put it.” She’d enrolled again at the Royal College; she was taking a refresher course in fashion and fabric design. It made her feel better on one day, worse on another, as if a whole chunk of life had been wasted. Someone had to be to blame.

  That evening she took out the folder in which she kept the yellowy and tattered photographs of Nell’s infancy and early childhood, and looked and stared, and the feeling came to her once again, “Nell isn’t dead. She isn’t. She’s just as alive as Barbara is.” Helen then remembered Arthur Hockney. She wondered what had become of him. She found his work number in an old diary, and called him. They said he’d left. He was some kind of community worker now; he ran a center for underprivileged kids in Harlem. But they gave her his number.

  By the way, reader, Nell failed her Math O Level. I think she did it on purpose, for her best friend Brenda’s sake. Brenda failed the lot. At any rate, on the day of the exam Nell quite deliberately didn’t wear her teddy bear on the silver chain, the old tin thing with the jewel inside, which she always wore for luck.

  ON HER OWN

  THE FACT WAS, HELEN had changed. Remember, she had married young; she’d had very little time to develop her own nature, or discover her likes and dislikes. She’d grown up with a willful and difficult father and a put-upon mother, and had learned early the childish and painful art of conciliation; how to survive as a small buffer state between two large warring ones, forever keeping the peace at her own expense. Then, married to Clifford, her opinions, perforce, had been his; he’d turned her from an artless (more or less) girl into a cool and knowledgeable woman who could read a wine list and tell a real Jacobean chest from a fake without even trying, but had no choice but to like what he liked, despise what he despised. Then when Simon took Clifford’s place in the marital bed, she’d adopted her new husband’s political views, his kindly, worldly, international cynicism. It is women’s capacity thus to learn to keep the domestic peace simply by agreeing—but it does them no good in the end of course. They go to sleep confused, and wake up confused, and become depressed.

  But now when the three boys asked her questions Helen would be obliged to give answers which were not John Lally’s, nor Clifford Wexford’s, nor Simon Cornbrook’s, but her own, and very interesting she found them to be, too; almost, but never quite, making up for grief, loss and loneliness. Clifford (or was it Angie’s doing? Clifford had met his match in Angie!) would now only talk to Helen through solicitors and made her argue and beg for every grudging maintenance check. It was humiliating. But she could see her own fault in it. She’d had talents, and failed to develop them. She’d handed the responsibility for her own well-being over to others, and then complained about it. She’d been a wife, a mistress, a mother, and thought that was enough. But she had not even been a good mother—had she not lost Nell? she had not been a good wife—had she not lost her husband? All she was good at, all she’d been trained for—and she could see it now, deprived as she was of status, invitations and fashionable friends, all now turning out to exist only by courtesy of her marriage to Clifford—was asking for money, and she wasn’t even very good at that.

  Well, now she was determined to be free of Clifford. She’d taken a refresher course. Now she looked up old acquaintances; she borrowed money on the strength of the one early John Lally she owned, a sketch of a drowned cat given to her on her eighteenth birthday—

  “Looks like your mother in from shopping, on a wet day,” he’d said, joking (Ha! ha!) on that occasion. Helen had kept the drawing in the back of a drawer ever since, and hated it. But sentiment doesn’t pay mortgages, or start businesses. She’d taken out the drawing, gone with it to the bank, left it as security. And here she was, a bright new designer label on the London fashion scene: House of Lally. Her father was furious. She was bringing the family name into disrepute. Helen just laughed. Whenever had her father not been furious? And besides, his fury had somehow lost its bite. He could be seen, any day at Applecore Cottage, actually feeding the new baby Julian with a bottle. Marjorie had trouble breast-feeding—or so she said. It was Helen’s belief it was a put-up job, to get John Lally close to his new son. Which he was.

  Simon wanted to remarry Helen, of course. She laughed and said, “Enough of that!” Some knots, she could tell, simply needed untying, not further complicating. And, reader, interestingly, the very style of Helen’s beauty changed, as did her l
ife. She no longer seemed fragile and just a little mournful—now she gleamed with energy. Clifford, seeing his former wife one day on a television program, was quite put out. What had happened to her? Why was she not pining away for loss of him? Angie said the change was skin-deep, and that underneath the new gloss Helen was the same helpless, hopeless, drifting, stone-around-the-neck, frame-maker’s daughter she’d always been, and switched the program off.

  It flattered Clifford to agree with Angie, but when the next check he sent Helen (three weeks late, of course) was returned, he did wonder. He almost thought he would visit her, but he could see that to put in an appearance now could only confuse the twins, since he so resolutely denied his paternity. So he did nothing. Only now, once again, Helen entered his dreams, and sometimes little Nell too, as she’d been when he last saw her. Where Angie couldn’t follow, there he and his true wife and his lost daughter went.

  SEEING ARTHUR

  THIS WAS THE STATE of affairs when Helen contacted Arthur Hockney once again. He came visiting with Sarah, now his wife, and the dog Kim, now an elegant, gentle beast who could safely enter the most cluttered and expensive drawing-room in the land. Arthur came reluctantly. He remembered well the pain Helen had inflicted the night he had baby-sat and she had not come home. Why should he revive all that again? But, seeing her, he realized two things: both that she had changed and that he was no longer in love with her. He loved Sarah. Sarah was not second-best at all. It was a wonderful revelation.