The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  “I can’t put Nell’s ghost to rest,” said Helen. “And that’s the truth of it. If ghost it be, and not the real, live, living Nell. Arthur, please try!”

  “I am no longer an investigator,” he pointed out. “I’m here for a conference on race relations.” He too had been back to college, he had completed the law course he long ago had walked out of.

  But he did try. He called at Mrs. Blotton’s little terraced house and found her gone, and in the window a cardboard card announcing the residence of a Mrs. A. Haskins, Clairvoyant. Mrs. Haskins was fifty and fleshy, with loose jowls, a deep voice and large, tired, beautiful eyes. Mrs. Blotton had gone, she said, where Arthur couldn’t follow her.

  “Where’s that?”

  “The Other Side of Death,” said Mrs. Haskins. “Into the Light of the Hereafter.” The poor woman, a nonsmoker herself, had died of lung cancer, the result of passive smoking. “Inhaling the smoke from her husband’s cigarettes, year after year.

  “I’m sorry,” said Arthur.

  “Death is a cause for rejoicing, not weeping,” said Mrs. Haskins, and offered to tell Arthur’s fortune. Arthur accepted. He did not believe, or quite not believe, in clairvoyance. He was aware that sometimes he seemed to know more than could rationally be explained; and if he did, why not others? It is always tempting to find out what’s going to happen next.

  Mrs. Haskins took his black, heavy hands and stared a little, and then pushed them away. “You’d do better telling it for yourself,” she said, and he understood her meaning, or half understood it. A tough black lawyer, ex-detective from New York, would rather believe in his own professionalism, any day, than in any convenient capacity for seeing through brick walls! He prepared to take his leave.

  “She’ll find her own way home,” Mrs. Haskins remarked, out of the blue, as she walked flat-footed with him to the door. Her thick pale tights were laddered and the varicose veins showed through like knotted ropes but her eyes were bright.

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “The one you’re looking for. The lost child. She’s a powerful one, all right. An old soul. One of the greats.” And that was all Mary Haskins would say. More than enough, the superstitious amongst us might think!

  Arthur went back to Helen and told her Nell’s trail was finally cold; that she must live in the present, not the past. He was glad to be rid of the role of detective. The work had been upsetting. It brought him too closely into contact with things which were better brushed past, not lingered with. He too feared for his soul; he wanted to live in the here and now, not forever on the brink of the past, of the present, sensing too much, knowing too little.

  “How’ve you’ve changed,” said Helen. She wasn’t quite sure how, or why. But she knew she felt easier in his company. She liked Sarah. She was glad he was happy.

  “It’s the baby’s doing,” said Sarah. “He’s settled down.” And though it’s true babies affect their fathers, almost as much as their mothers, with the desire for peace, and a certain future, I think myself it was Arthur’s coming to terms with his own conscience, one day in Mrs. Blotton’s house, that had made the difference. Mrs. Blotton, in spite of herself, did much good in her lifetime, and deserves to be remembered for it. May she rest in peace.

  SUMMER AT THE KENNELS

  MR. AND MRS. KILDARE went away for the month of August, the year Nell took her O levels. They went to Greece. They left Nell and Brenda behind, in charge of the kennels. Summer is a busy time in such places. Well, you know how it is, people want to go abroad and can’t take their dogs with them; or at any rate, if they do, can’t bring them back into the country freely for fear of rabies. Moreover the Kildares had just opened authorized quarantine kennels—here they could take a dozen dogs, and keep them isolated for the required eight months. It meant a great deal of extra work—if also money—as the animals had to be not just exercised and fed, but talked to and cheered up, or else they lapsed into apathy, and either went off their food and grew thin, or became sluggish, fat and mournful—and then there would be uproar from the punters. One way or another Mr. and Mrs. Kildare were glad to get away.

  Nell and Brenda were not glad to be left, of course. Brenda had never been abroad in her life, and wanted to very much, and though we know Nell has, she has no memory of it. Never can there have been a kennel maid like Nell, at sixteen! Brenda was good-looking enough—though suffering rather from acne around her chin—but by comparison with Nell she looked positively plain. She was dumpy, that was the trouble; her eyes were small and her cheeks plump. How unfair life is!

  “Do you think they can be trusted?” asked Mrs. Kildare.

  “Of course they can,” said Mr. Kildare, thinking of hot sands and blue skies and no dogs.

  The Kildares loved dogs more than people, and often said so, which, for some reason beyond her parents’ comprehension, would upset Brenda and bring her out in spots. At the same time, they weren’t averse to leaving their charges whenever they could. They’d been away at Easter too, when the girls were studying for exams. This may have been why Brenda managed to fail so many.

  “Supposing something goes wrong,” said Mrs. Kildare. But Mr. Kildare thought to himself something was more likely to go wrong if they stayed home. He found it difficult not to stare at Nell, he wanted just to touch her, to get her to smile at him in a different way than she smiled at the rest of the world. Perhaps when he came back he’d feel differently. He hoped so. He didn’t admire himself. Well, he was forty-five. She was sixteen. A twenty-nine-year gap. Mind you, he had heard of greater. She wasn’t a born animal-handler, as his wife was, and Brenda too, but she was good enough. Perhaps he and she could start again together—she was only a waif and stray, when it came to it. She had no background. She would be grateful—“A penny for your thoughts,” said Mrs. Kildare, and Mr. Kildare was ashamed of them. But how can a man not think what he thinks.

  Something did go wrong, of course. Two sixteen-year-old girls can’t look after thirty dogs, and themselves, and the visitors and bookings, and fight off Ned (eighteen) and Rusty (sixteen), brothers from a neighboring farm, who wanted to come in and watch TV, because reception at home was so bad.

  “And what else?” asked Nell.

  “That’s all,” they promised. But it wasn’t, of course.

  After some fumbling and mumbling the girls got them to leave. That was on Wednesday night.

  “I hate boys,” said Brenda. “I prefer dogs.”

  “I don’t,” said Nell. She was worried about her bosom though. She thought it was enormous. It wasn’t, of course. But Ned had made a beeline to unbutton it. Why hers, not Brenda’s? And she felt she must smell of dog food. She didn’t, of course. But she was sixteen. You know how it is.

  On Thursday morning two of the dogs refused to eat. On Thursday evening eight had gone on a hunger strike. By Friday evening all thirty of them were off their food. There didn’t seem to be much wrong with them. They just sniffed, and lay around, and stared at Nell and Brenda with reproachful eyes and didn’t eat. Then the ones who’d stopped eating on Thursday began to sneeze.

  On Saturday morning all were sneezing and the girls called in the vet. He diagnosed some kind of food-related viral infection; inspected the scullery where they prepared the food, passed it okay, and gave every single dog an antibiotic jab to be on the safe side. He left a bill for ninety pounds, and said he’d be back on Tuesday. It should be cleared up by then, whatever it was.

  He seemed surprised that Brenda and Nell had been left in charge.

  “We can cope,” they said. “We have before.”

  “Um,” he said, and then, to Nell, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” she said. He looked her up and down. She wasn’t used to it. “You look older than that to me,” he said.

  Nell resolved to go on a diet. She didn’t eat for three days, not a morsel. Nor, when it came to it, did the dogs.

  “It’s the food,” said Nell on Monday evening. The dogs were
no longer reproachful, but full of protest, howling and moaning and restless. “It must be. They’re just acting like hungry dogs.”

  “It can’t be the food,” said Brenda. “It’s the same sack we were using a week ago; and they were eating it then.” (The dogs were fed on kind a of canine muesli, which was mixed into a slop with hot water. It had a pungent smell.)

  “I just know it’s the food,” said Nell, and mixed some to try herself.

  “You can’t!” cried Brenda.

  “I’ll spit it out,” said Nell. Oh, she was brave. She brought the spoon of slop to her lips; she grimaced: she sneezed. At that very moment Ned appeared in the scullery door, with a tearful Rusty more or less under his arm.

  “You know what he’s done?” said Ned. “He’s put sneezing powder from the joke shop in your animal food. I brought him up to say he’s sorry.”

  “Sorry,” said Rusty. “Except I’m not. Who do you think you are anyway—” and he tucked a heel under his brother’s calf, and was free, and off. Brenda helped Ned up and Nell opened a new sack of food and mixed it up for the dogs. They ate with gratitude. The vet came on Tuesday and gave them another bill—a £25 house-call fee, and made no apology at all. The Kildares were furious on their return. Calling the vet out is what no one who keeps animals for profit likes to do. And I’m sorry to say Mr. Kildare’s feelings for Nell hadn’t altered one bit.

  “You’ve gotten thin,” he said, looking her up and down.

  “Not thin enough,” was Nell’s silent reply, “in that case,” and after that Mrs. Kildare had quite a lot of trouble tempting her to eat at all. You know what girls of that age are. The only good thing that came out of the whole episode was that Brenda and Ned got it together; and though that left Nell rather on her own (Rusty was a dead loss, obviously) she was glad, for Brenda’s sake. She did some really good dog drawings, which the Kildares used on their brochures, and had printed up as Christmas cards, and sold. They didn’t pay Nell anything, of course. They fed her and housed her and clothed her, didn’t they. And they’d see her through her O levels. They felt they were generosity itself.

  TALK OF THE DEVIL

  READER, I WISH I could tell you that Angie was happy, now she had what she wanted—that is to say, Clifford. But you know how it is—traveling is better than arriving. Angie wasn’t in the least happy. She was bored and restless, and had too much money, and too much spare time, and though I don’t think she noticed particularly about Clifford not loving her, it must surely in some way have affected her. It would me, and probably you. She was bothered and irritated by her little girl Barbara, if and when she saw her, as mothers sometimes can be when they don’t have the day-to-day handling of their children. And so she filled the emptiness of her life as best she could. That is to say she got mixed up with a chalk-faced, black-leathery pop group named Satan’s Enterprise who, though in truth rather gentle and nervous lads, dabbled in black magic and cocaine for the sake of PR. Some say Marco the lead singer was her lover, though I don’t think that was necessarily true, and nor, once he’d met him, did Clifford.

  But if you weave nasty spells, and pretend to raise demons by horrid incantations in deserted chapels, even for fun, profit and the benefit of cameras, you might very well bite off more than you can chew, or stir up more than you can handle. Disagreeable things happen; scandals ensue.

  This is how this one went.

  Clifford and Angie were due at the first night of The Exorcist. Clifford turned up on his own, without Angie on his arm. The press sensed trouble. It was their habit to follow Clifford around, in the hope of snapping him with the wrong person in the right place, or vice versa, sometimes succeeding. Then they would besiege Angie, hoping to catch her unawares, in distress, which of course they never did. She’d be rude, shut the door in their faces. Once she even poured a kettleful of boiling water over some photographers from the window of Barbara’s nursery.

  “It isn’t sensible to upset the press, Angie,” Clifford said. “They’ll get their revenge.”

  “It should have been boiling oil,” she replied. “Water loses heat too quickly. And don’t you upset me, and then I won’t upset them.”

  It wasn’t like Angie to miss a First Night: she’d been looking forward to seeing The Exorcist. She’d heard about green vomit and necks which swiveled all the way around. Earlier in the day she’d appeared on a live TV show in an afternoon program about “How I Look After My Face” and she’d said so. She also said all she did was wash her face with soap and water and slap on a little face cream. Lies! Worse than Helen in the early days. Helen never lied, these days. It was beneath her dignity. My own view is that married women lie far more than the single or the divorced. Ask a wife how much a joint of meat cost and she’ll take a third off. Ask a single woman and she’ll tell you straight. But that’s another story. Cynthia, by the way, watched Angie on TV, and said to Otto, “There, I knew she never used moisturizers. What a fool the woman is.” They saw as little of Angie as they possibly could, being upset about the fate of Dannemore Court, though all Otto said was, “Well, she paid twice what she should for the place. And it had served its purpose. How was I to know she’d join the family?”

  Anyway, Angie’s nonappearance caused a stir; the empty seat (so expensive!) beside Clifford spoke of domestic emergency. Clifford seemed to be white with anger, and actually, instead of “No comment,” said, “What my wife does is her business.”

  Word got around that Angie had left the TV studios in the company of Marco, of Satan’s Enterprise. A group of reporters dispatched themselves to the mews house in Kensington where the group dwelt, arriving in time to see an ambulance outside, and Angie, naked and overdosed, carried out. Neighbors spoke of drugs and orgies.

  Angie was revived in St. George’s Hospital and her stomach was, rather unkindly, pumped. All Clifford would say, emerging from the screening of The Exorcist, was that he hated the film, and no, he would not be visiting his wife in the hospital. Nor did he.

  Well, the press loved all that, didn’t they, not liking Angie. Clifford had been right. They got their revenge. They went for the jugular. Barbara’s best friend was a small princess, with whom she shared a coat-peg at nursery school. Barbara would go to a royal household for lunch; the princess would come to Barbara’s for tea—and Angie would be hovering then, you bet, all maternal smiles out on the step for the press on those occasions, as the two met and embraced. Now it was—

  DRUG TOT IN PALACE NURSERY SCANDAL.

  DRUG EVIL BRUSHES PALACE

  TINY ROYAL CHILD VISITS DRUG DEN.

  And so forth. And somehow, though the fuss in the papers died down, the palace tot no longer came to tea, or shared photographers, or dancing class, and no more royal invitations came for Barbara.

  Clifford laughed, and said, “You brought it on yourself,” and Angie stamped and said, “You drove me to it.” Barbara grieved and was more silent than ever. She’d lost a friend.

  And somehow, after that, the fun just went out of everything for Angie. There seemed nowhere to go. Clifford was depressed (of course he was depressed, his talent and spirit so overshadowed by the enormity of Angie’s wealth). He seemed to have no spirit left. He wasn’t the catch she’d thought. She said so, rashly, and for once wished it was bitten back the moment it was out.

  In retaliation, he kept out of her bed. Even if she’d put the biggest diamond in the world in her navel, he wouldn’t have cared. Angie went away for a month to a beauty farm in California and had a facelift and a skin peel in an attempt to improve her complexion—thinking perhaps that was the trouble—and something went wrong. Her skin erupted into bumps and crevices and was worse than ever.

  “Serves you right,” said Clifford, when she came back. No amount of Max Factor Erace (cheapest but still the best) helped. She wore enormous dark glasses and collars up to her ears and Barbara screamed when she saw her.

  “She’s forgotten who you are,” said Clifford. “Lucky little thing.” No man likes h
is wife taking off for a month, even if he doesn’t like the wife.

  Poor Angie—yes, really, poor—Angie, thought she deserved pity and help and all she had was Clifford looking at her with a kind of hard look, as if she was a failure in the world. She pondered briefly whether she mightn’t be happier if she gave all her money away, but only briefly, remembering her father saying, “The trouble with you, Angie, is that you were just born unlovable.” In which case, obviously, the richer she was the better.

  She called Marco, not having spoken to him since all the silly fuss about the overdose. Nor had he called her, but she was used to that. There had been four of them, three men and her. She didn’t usually do that sort of thing. Drummer, bass guitar, Marco the vocalist, and she was the angel. The Black Angel. They’d black-boot-polished her all over. There’d been black all over the hospital sheets. The nurses had thought it so unfunny she’d had to laugh. In California they’d said something about the residual chemicals from the polish upsetting the skin peel, but that was their way of not being sued. Fat chance they had.

  “Hi,” said Marco.

  “Hi,” said Angie. “You know the chapel we hired for the video?”

  Marco did. They’d recorded a song called “Satan’s Tits.” It had risen to Number 24 on the strength of the video, a mini-spectacular staged in a disused, but not unconsecrated chapel, on the grounds of a crumbling English country house. The owner, called by phone in Monte Carlo for permission to use the chapel, had said drunkenly, “Do what you like. It’s haunted, anyway.” And a certain Father McCrombie, who lived alone in the one uncrumbled wing of the house, had opened it up for them. He was the caretaker. They’d filmed his thick old hands on virgin flesh. Opportunists!