The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  Now Angie had never told Father McCrombie what went on inside her secret soul, but somehow he got in there and knew more about it than she did herself. Poor Angie! No one nice had ever tried to get inside her soul, so now it was left to horrible red-faced, red-bearded, pop-eyed, occasionally red-eyed evil Father McCrombie, and she knew no better than to let him. The world had failed Angie, as much as she had failed it. It was a two-way system.

  Father McCrombie lit black candles for Helen. He named her on the slip of paper wound around the wax, fixed with a drop of McCrombie’s spittle. This, or something, gave Helen a nasty patch of sleeping badly and suffering from really horrid, murderous, obsessive thoughts. Around and around they went in her head. There were anxious, worrying, busy thoughts—such as—if she could only find Nell, then Clifford would come back to her. There were bleak, lowering, fateful thoughts—for example, that losing Clifford was her punishment for losing Nell. (“Losing Clifford” seemed once again a real concept.) And then there were the terrible thoughts, the murderous rage and hate, focused against little Barbara. At the very thought of the child of her rival (Her rival? What sort of thinking was this?) bile and spite would rise in her throat. She would wake in the morning with a sour taste in her mouth. And around and around the half-sleeping thoughts went through her waking day. If only Barbara would die, then Clifford would return to her. Yes, that was the way! So she planned the child’s death in her mind: by fire, road accident, wild dogs—horrible! She knew it was disgusting but she couldn’t stop it. Remarkable, is it not? This propensity we all have to deflect our hate and anger from its proper source to someone standing innocently on the sidelines. As if somehow this will safeguard us, stop our curses deflecting back on us, as curses have such a habit of doing!

  CURE

  HELEN SPENT A WEEKEND with the children at Applecore Cottage. It was no longer in her father’s nature to ban her on this account or that. And now that she had his affection and approval (well, more or less) she could not understand why the lack of them had not afflicted her in the past. There was a guest annex now; the apple tree in the garden had been cut down to make room for it. The bough was gone on which the robin had once sat and twittered its easy comfort. Was this what it had foreseen? Worldly comfort, worldly success? (You can see how sad she was!)

  Well, the annex was comfortable, and centrally heated. The children had their own TV. (Once John Lally had banned it altogether from the house.) The beds were new and softly firm, and the pillows were, she thought, plumping with an experienced hand, goose-down. What Evelyn, whose body in life and sleep lay on a broken mattress, her head upon a lumpy pillow, would not have done for such luxuries! How easily Marjorie extracted good things from her husband, how she had changed him and chained him! Helen marveled at it, and these days without resentment or jealousy. Little Julian, Marjorie’s son and her own half-brother, had a somehow stolid, ordinary look, as befitted the child of not so extraordinary parents after all. Her own boys, beside him, were animated, vulnerable and alert. But they played cricket together, happily enough, on the lawn which was once Evelyn’s vegetable patch. Marjorie had had it turfed over.

  “Father’s looking well,” said Helen to Marjorie. She had a headache. They were in the new, custom-built kitchen. The walls between outhouse and pantry, pantry and kitchen had been taken down. Nothing strange moved now in the half-dark. All was bright and light and sensible.

  “I stopped him drinking homemade wine,” said Marjorie. “I put a lot of his former troubles down to that.”

  “But how did you stop him?”

  “I poured the lot away.”

  Poor Evelyn! Season after season, in the interests of economy and ecology, with nettles, rosehips, parsnips: plucking, picking, digging, stripping, sieving, pounding, boiling, brewing, funneling, filtering, lifting, storing. Poured the lot away! Helen felt a dart of hatred toward Marjorie. It was quite uncalled for, but she couldn’t stop it. It made her headache worse. She put her head in her hands.

  “Whatever’s the matter? Something’s wrong, isn’t it? You’re so white and pale.” Her stepmother (she had never thought of Marjorie in such terms before) was kind and concerned. Helen wept.

  “Thoughts in my head,” she said presently, “which oughtn’t to be there.”

  Marjorie had an answer. She always did. She assumed that if there was a problem it could be solved. She recommended a Dr. Myling, whom she’d seen herself. He was a psychiatrist, but of the holistic school.

  “The what?” asked Helen.

  “It doesn’t really matter what it’s called,” said Marjorie. “If you ask me, all these new healers are just priests under another name.”

  “But I’m not religious,” said Helen. “Or not particularly.” She remembered there’d been a time when she’d prayed to God, quite instinctively, though of course as a child she’d never gone to church. Then she’d thought the universe was benign, and needed, and wanted, simply to worship. But something had happened, long ago, to put an end to it. What was it? Why of course, the death of Nell. Now there, she’d said it. She accepted it, at least. And the shadow above her, instead of lightening, as everyone had predicted, simply darkened. The dark was beginning to press upon her, almost physically; as if it wanted to squelch her into mud, make her part of it.

  “I can see,” she said, with an effort, “that if you believed, faith-healing of the mind could work, just as it does with the body, but I don’t really believe. I wish I did.”

  The wish made things a little better, enough to write down Dr. Myling’s address, and let Marjorie make an appointment. Though, as Marjorie said, it’s usually better to make the appointment yourself. To go of your own volition, not be pushed, feeling the urge toward health and sanity not as the mere desire to please someone else.

  “Just sometimes,” said Marjorie, “the cure is not in yourself, you need another human being to take you by the hand. In the same way that people who go on acid trips need to take a friend with them,” she said.

  Odd that she’d made that analogy. It was a subject (in case you’re wondering) she knew little about. It was on one such trip, remember, that Father McCrombie had escorted Lord Sebastian, and lost his former self in transit, the way some people lose baggage between Singapore and Paris.

  Dr. Myling had an address in Wimpole Street, and shared an ugly, quiet, grand waiting-room with a group of other doctors, who were mostly orthopedic specialists, judging from the creaking backs and cracking joints of the waiting patients. Quiet, quiet—creak, crack—Helen wanted to laugh. She felt she hadn’t laughed for a long time, but surely this was not the time to do it? Even her own mirth oppressed her. Dr. Myling was a young man. He was barely thirty. He had the strong jaw and quiet good looks so loved by those who let people into medical schools. She thought, when she had explained her symptoms—unnecessary, nasty, murderous thoughts, laughter at what wasn’t funny—that he’d ask about her childhood or give her pills, or suggest she was having an early menopause and suggest Hormone Replacement Therapy.

  “Do you have murderous thoughts?” is one of the questions asked when a lack of estrogen in a woman’s hormonal balance is suspected. Instead he asked if someone was ill-wishing her.

  “I can’t think who,” she said in astonishment, “and if there was, what could I do about it?”

  He considered, asked a few brisk questions about the past and Applecore Cottage, and then suggested she pray to her mother. Helen laughed again, in her surprise, and said she didn’t think her mother, dead or alive, could stop anything. It wasn’t in her nature.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “People change.” (What could he mean?) “Come back in two weeks, and if it hasn’t worked, then we will try pills. But only then.”

  So Helen tried praying and, reader, whether it was Evelyn’s spirit blowing out Father McCrombie’s cheap and nastily labeled candles, or just Helen’s naturally kind and healthy mind asserting itself, but the night horrors simply went, Helen slept soundly again, p
aid Dr. Myling’s bill for £45, and left it at that.

  Clifford had no one to pray to, no one to intercede for him, and would probably have been too proud and rational to approach such a person anyway, whether living or dead, and so his troubles got worse, not better.

  DISTURBANCE

  OUR NELL, IN TROUBLE! Unthinkable. But even the most charmed amongst us, in their growing up, seem to go through a couple of bad years, when they scowl and jeer, are unhealthy, dirty and generally ungrateful, and seem to enjoy making a nuisance of themselves. Then all their elders and betters can do is grit their teeth and sit it out, and wait for a benign and kindly spirit to once again inhabit their child. Nell’s bad years came between seventeen and nineteen.

  Perhaps now at last she could take the risk of misbehaving? When her future seemed set Fair? In her early years she had been torn this way and that, as if both bad and good fairy godmothers had bent over her cradle, each claiming Nell for her own. Clifford had raged and Helen wept, the skies themselves had spat her out, Milord and Milady had invoked devils. There had been the trauma of the roadway inferno; the abrupt end to the criminal idyll of Faraway Farm—and though each disaster had been balanced by some good event, these traumas and distresses were there in her mind and must in the end take their toll. This was it, the fine exacted by the past upon the present.

  On her sixteenth birthday all was still well. She was a nice, bright, lively, loving girl who passed exams, helped her quasi-family the Kildares (she worked in fact as a kennel maid, unpaid, and never complained) and tried to catch Dai Evans’ eye. Then Polly visited. By seventeen she had shorn her thick curly hair almost to the scalp and dyed it black, she was anorexic, she was so offended by her art teacher’s view of what was good and bad in painting that she gave up A Level Art altogether. She caught her history teacher out on a matter of fact and refused to attend another lesson thereafter. So that was History A Level out, which left French and she was deciding to take moral exception to Racine, so presumably French didn’t have long to go. And Dai Evans had gone into the Navy so what was the point of going to school at all: a point which occurred to Mrs. Kildare, the day when Nell should have been at school and simply, somehow, wasn’t.

  “Heaven knows what’s the point of you going to school at all,” said Mrs. Kildare, listening to Nell’s account of the general folly and wrong-headedness of her teachers. She was overworked. The quarantine section had been expanded and business was good, but wages were (by custom and practice) low, and the kennels miles from anywhere, so staff was always hard to find. Mrs. Kildare was in the kitchen boiling up meat for the dogs: the hot-plates in the scullery were no longer enough. A horrible smell but they were all used to it.

  “Neither do I,” said Nell, for once not arguing.

  “In that case,” said Mrs. Kildare, “you’d better leave school at the end of term and earn your keep properly, for once.” Mrs. Kildare, as we know, was going through a hard time, otherwise she wouldn’t have added “for once.” A pity she did.

  Nell left school that very day, to the great distress and protest of teachers and friends, to work full-time at the kennels.

  What had happened, reader, as you and I but no one else should know, was that Mr. Kildare, aged forty-five, worrying about being fifty, looking forward to a future in which nothing happened except changes in the quarantine laws at best, and growing older at worst, had stopped simply lusting after Nell and fallen in love with her. These things happen. Poor Mrs. Kildare! Lust can be disguised; love can’t. Hands tremble, faces pale, voices quiver. Mrs. Kildare had her suspicions. It didn’t improve her temper, or make her more patient with Nell. And poor Nell too! There was no one in whom she could confide. How could she talk to Mrs. Kildare about what was going on? Or Brenda, or any of her school friends in case it got back to Brenda? If she cut off her hair it was to make herself unattractive. It didn’t work. If she stopped going to school it was to make herself stupid. That didn’t work, either. All that happened was that everyone disapproved except Mr. Kildare. He would come up to her at feeding-time—and her hands smelled horrid from the mix, but not even that put him off—staring with his great brown eyes, and beg her to run off with him.

  “Why are you so unkind?” he’d ask.

  “I don’t mean to be unkind, Mr. Kildare.”

  “Call me Bob! Don’t be so formal. Aren’t you grateful for all I’ve done for you?”

  “I’m grateful to Mrs. Kildare too.”

  “If we explain properly, she’ll understand.”

  “Explain what, Mr. Kildare?”

  “Our love, Nell, I’ve never loved my wife. We’ve just made do. Stayed together because of Brenda. And now you’ve come along. I think God sent you—”

  “Not our love, Mr. Kildare. Yours. And please, please, don’t tell me about it; it isn’t fair.”

  But he would, he did: his hands came nearer and were less easy to push away. And Brenda began to look at her oddly. Oh, it was intolerable! Nell packed her things one night, put her lucky tin teddy bear around her neck, took her savings (£63.70) out of the bank and caught the train to London. It would upset Mrs. Kildare but what else could she do?

  The smoke of Father McCrombie’s black candles drifted over the Kildare household, twining in and out of the trees, puffing around the kennels, making the dogs whine and grow restless. Or something did.

  “What’s the matter with them lately?” Mrs. Kildare asked. “I expect they miss Nell,” said Mr. Kildare. Now Nell was gone the smoke was getting out of his mind; it was clearing again; he could hardly remember his own behavior, his own straying, pinching hand. Of course he loved his wife. He always had.

  “It happened before she left,” said Mrs. Kildare. “If anything, they’re better now. It’s just me who’s not,” and she cried a little. She missed Nell and not just because now she had to work twice as hard—up at five and in bed by twelve, when the last upset, homesick, howling hound had been soothed and quietened (and even later sometimes when the moon was full and bright), but she’d loved her almost as much as Brenda, for all that she’d been such a problem of late.

  Only Brenda said nothing about Nell. She didn’t know what to say, Nell was her best friend, and she’d seen how her father looked at Nell, and now Nell was gone, and she didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. She became rather stolid and spotty and dull-eyed, as girls who look after animals seem to do in their late adolescence. Evil never clears completely away; it leaves a residue, a kind of greasy film over hope and good cheer. “I like animals best,” she’d say, as she’d heard her parents say before her. “They’re much nicer than humans.” But she agreed to get engaged to Ned. She’d rather be a farmer’s wife than the daughter of kennels, for now Nell had gone it was as if the sunlight had gone with her. She could see the place for what it was—muddy, noisy, dismal, sad. And, like Nell, she wanted to be out of it.

  Of course Angie had no idea that Nell was alive. Had she known it, I have no doubt she would have instructed Father McCrombie to light a black candle for her, too. As it was, the dark father just had to direct ill-will in a general direction, which is why it got to Mr. Kildare’s heart, but not to Nell’s. In fact, things turned out very well for Nell as a result. Or was that Evelyn’s doing again—Evelyn, looking down from heaven, puffing out the candles as fast as Father McCrombie lit them?

  Look, we could speculate on this forever. Middle-aged men fall for young women without the dark powers having to be involved, God knows, so let’s just say Mr. Kildare was a dirty old man. But I don’t know—say that of Brenda’s father? It seems unkind.

  MEETING UP!

  BE THAT AS IT may, at about the time that Helen recovered from her night horrors, and the dangerous Homer McLinsky looked oddly at Clifford (who had no protector: why should Evelyn even think of the man who caused her daughter so much trouble), Nell turned up at the House of Lally workshops behind Broadcasting House in London’s West End. She was a black-haired, punkish, too-thin, scraggy Welsh girl with
rough hands and no A levels, let alone an Art School training.

  “I want a job,” she said to Hector McLaren, Helen’s business manager. He was a broad, fair man with boxer’s shoulders, and thick stubby fingers which moved surely and delicately amongst fabrics, seeing profit or loss in every swatch. Which was just as well, since Helen could be carried away by beauty and cease to be practical.

  “You’re not the only one,” he said. He was busy. A dozen girls a week turned up, on spec, in just the same way. They’d read about the House of Lally, or seen the clothes on a young Royal back, at some Royal spectacular, and wanted to be involved. They were turned away, automatically if kindly. The House of Lally took on ten apprentices a year, and trained them well. Two thousand applied, ten were chosen.

  “I’m not like the others,” she said, as if it was obvious, and smiled, and he realized she was both beautiful and bright, and doing him the favor, not he her.

  “Let’s have a look at your portfolio then,” he said, not quite sure why, and someone else answered the telephone. A call from Rio.

  He knew before he opened the portfolio, stretching and releasing the neat, white confining bands, that it was going to be exciting. He’d opened thousands. You got to know; the pleasure of discovery couldn’t restrain itself, got to you a moment too soon. He was right. What a portfolio it was! Swatches of natural fabrics, lichen dyed, but finely finished. Now how had she contrived those? Wild, brilliant squares of embroidery, intricately worked. She liked color—if anything it was too strong, too bold—but what he usually saw in such portfolios was so tentative, so well-behaved. And then sheet after sheet of dress designs—untrained and amateurish, but done with such a surety of line—almost a kind of blind conviction. A handful were even usable—a couple more than usable.