by Fay Weldon
Clifford arrived later than Helen expected. She felt sulky. Leonardo’s took up too much of his time and attention. Sausages crackled and hot potatoes went splut! in cinders; rockets rippled and fountains of light poured skyward, and cries of amazement and delight drifted on a light wind over Camden Town gardens, along with the bonfire smoke. There was a lot of rum in the hot toddy. If there had been less, none of it might have happened.
Helen looked through a veil of smoke and saw Clifford approaching. She forgave him: she began to smile. But who was that by his side? Angie? Helen’s smile faded. Surely not. Angie, last heard of, had been in South Africa. But yes, that’s who it was. Fur-coated, fur-hatted, high-leather-booted, miniskirted, showing the bare stretch of stockinged thigh fashionable at the time; Angie, smirking at Helen, even while Angie most affectionately squeezed Clifford’s hand. Helen blinked and Angie was gone. Worse still. What was she hiding? What collusion was this? Helen had kept Angie’s wedding-night phone call to herself, biting pain and insult back, forgetting it, putting it out of her mind. Or that’s what she thought she’d done. If only she had, and not just thought she had, none of it might have happened.
Clifford took Helen’s arm, comfortingly uxorious. Helen shook it petulantly free—never what a woman should do to a man of high self-regard. But she’d had four hot toddies, waiting for Clifford, and was less sober than she knew. If only she’d let him hold her arm. But no!
“That was Angie, you came with Angie, you’ve been with Angie.”
“It was, I did, I have,” said Clifford coolly.
“I thought she was in South Africa.”
“She’s over here helping me set up the Contemporary Section. If you took any interest at all in Leonardo’s, you’d know.”
Unfair! Wasn’t Helen going to daily courses in the History of Art, in order to catch up? Wasn’t she, at twenty-three, running a house with servants, and entertaining, and looking after a small child as well? Wasn’t she neglected by her husband for Leonardo’s sake? Helen slapped Clifford’s face (if only she hadn’t) and Angie stepped out of the bonfire smoke, and smiled again at Helen a little victorious smile, which Clifford didn’t see. (No suggesting Angie could have behaved other than how she did. No sirree!)
“You’re completely mad,” said Clifford to Helen, “insanely jealous,” and left the party forthwith with Angie. (Oh, oh, oh!)
Well, he was cross. No man likes to be hit in public, or accused of infidelity, without reason. And there certainly was no recent reason. Angie was biding her time. Her relationship with Clifford had of late indeed been bounded by Leonardo’s new Contemporary Section. Clifford had all but forgotten it had ever been anything else, or would he have brought Angie to the party? (If only he hadn’t! It is to Clifford’s credit that he, like Helen and unlike Angie, was capable of moral choice.)
Clifford took Angie back to her house in Belgravia and went straight home to Primrose Hill and listened to music and waited for Helen to come home. He decided to forgive her.
He waited until morning, and still she did not come. Then she rang to say she was at Applecore Cottage: her mother was ill. She put the phone down fast. Clifford had heard that one before—he sent Johnnie to check. Of course Helen was not at Applecore Cottage. How could she be? Her father still barred her from his door. The very folly of the lie compounded her offense.
And where had Helen been last night? Well, I’ll tell you. After Clifford had left the party with Angie on his arm, Helen, many hot toddies later, left it on the arm of a certain Laurence Durrance, scriptwriter, and husband of little Anne-Marie Durrance, neighbor and close friend. (After this particular choice of action, there was no going back. No more if-only’s. Flop, flop, flop, flop—down came the house of cards.)
Anne-Marie, four-foot-ten and six stone of joli-laide energy, stayed behind to weep and wail and tell everyone, very excitedly, that Helen Wexford had left the party with her husband Laurence. Not content with that, she wrung a confession out of Laurence the very next morning. (I took her to my office, snivelled Laurence. On the sofa. Very uncomfortable. You know all those books and papers. I was terribly drunk. Someone had spiked the hot toddy. She seemed so upset. She seemed so upset! cried Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie. Just one of those things. Sorry, sorry, sorry.) And, having heard all that, and before Helen returned from wherever (staying with a girlfriend, actually, trying to compose herself, so great was her guilt), Anne-Marie went and told Clifford where Helen had been the night before, with many unnecessary and untrue embellishments.
So when Helen did come home, Clifford was unforgiving in the most permanent kind of way. Indeed, Johnnie was just finishing changing the locks. Helen was on the doorstep in the keen November wind: her husband and baby on the other side of a locked door, in the warm.
“Let me in, let me in,” cried Helen, but he didn’t. Even though Nell set up a sympathetic wail, his heart stayed hardened. An unfaithful wife was no wife of his. She was worse than a stranger to him: she was an enemy.
So Helen had to go to a solicitor, didn’t she, and Clifford was already seeing his—he wasted no time. Anne-Marie had barely finished her tale than he was on the phone—and a very powerful and expensive solicitor he was and not only that, Anne-Marie thereupon decided to take the opportunity of divorcing Laurence and citing Helen, and by Christmas not only one but two marriages had been destroyed. And the cocoon of warmth and love in which Nell lived had been unwound, faster than the eye could see let alone the mind comprehend it seemed to Helen, and words of hate, despair and spite filled the air around Nell’s infant head, and when she smiled no one returned her smile, and Clifford was divorcing Helen, citing Laurence, and claiming custody of their little daughter.
You may not know about the custom of “citing.” In the old days, when the institution of marriage was a stronger and more permanent thing than it is now, it was seen to need outside intervention to push asunder any married couple. A marriage didn’t just “irretrievably break up” as a result of internal forces. Someone came along and did something, usually sexual. That someone was known as “the third party.” Sheets would be inspected for evidence, photographs taken through keyholes by private detectives, and the third party cited by the aggrieved spouse and get his (her) name in the papers. It was all perfectly horrid; and even if neither spouse was sincerely aggrieved, but simply wanted to part, the motions of sheets and keyholes would have to be gone through. Mind you, every cloud has a silver lining; a whole race of girls grew up who would inhabit seaside hotels and provide required evidence, and who earned a good and frequently easy living, sitting up all night drinking cups of coffee and embracing only when the light through the keyhole suddenly went dark.
The only other mildly glittery lining to this particular cloud was that Helen made a kind of peace with her father—any enemy of Clifford was a friend of his, albeit his own daughter (alleged daughter: he would not give Evelyn the comfort of ceasing to disown Helen as his flesh and blood)—and was allowed back into the little back bedroom of Applecore Cottage to weep her shame and anguish away, there where the familiar robin sat on the apple-tree branch, just outside her bedroom window, red-breasted, head on one side, clucking and chirruping at her distress, promising her better times to come.
LIES, ALL LIES!
THERE ARE SOME BABIES whom nobody fights over. If they are plain, or dull, or miserable or mopey, divorced and erring mothers are allowed to keep them and toil for them through the years. But what a charmer Nell was! Everyone wanted her: both parents, both sets of grandparents. Nell had a bright clear skin and a bright clear smile, and hardly ever cried, and if she did was quickly pacified. She was a hard and dedicated worker—and no one has to work harder than babies—when it came to developing her skills: learning to touch, to grasp, to sit, to crawl, to stand, to utter the first few words. She was brave, brilliant and spirited—a prize worth having, rather than a burden just about worth the bother of bearing. And how they fought over her.
“She isn’t fit to b
e a mother,” said Clifford to Van Erson, his freckled, ferocious solicitor. “She tried to abort the child. She never wanted it.”
“He only wants her to get back at me,” wept Helen to Edwin Druse, her gentle hippie adviser. “Please make him stop all this. I love him so much. Just that one stupid time, that silly party, I’d had too much to drink, I was only getting back at him for Angie. I can’t bear to lose Nell. I can’t. Please help me!”
Edwin Druse put out a gentle hand to soothe his distraught client. He thought she was too young to cope. He thought Clifford was a very negative kind of person indeed. She needed looking after. He thought perhaps he, Edwin Druse, would be the best person to do the looking after. He could convert her to vegetarianism, and she would no longer be prey to such despair. In fact he thought he and she could get on very well indeed if only Clifford and little Nell were out of the way. Edwin Druse was not perhaps the best legal representative Helen could have chosen, in the circumstances. However, there it was.
Add to that the fact that Clifford wanted Nell, and was in the habit of getting what he wanted, and you will see that in the struggle for her custody he had everything on his side. Money, power, clever barristers, outraged virtue—and his parents Otto and Cynthia behind him, to back him up with extra dollops of the same.
“Sweetness alone is not enough,” said Cynthia of Helen. “There must be some sense and discretion too.”
“A man can put up with many things from a wife,” said Otto, “but not being made a fool of in public.”
And Helen had nothing, except loveliness, and helplessness and mother-love, and Edwin Druse’s conscience, to put in the scales. And it was not enough.
Clifford divorced Helen for adultery, and there was no way she could deny the fact: what is more, Anne-Marie actually stood up there on the stand and testified, as she had done in her own divorce, “and I came home unexpectedly and found my husband Laurence in bed with Helen. Yes, it was the marital bed. Yes, the pair of them were naked.” Lies, all lies! Helen did not even try to counter-claim that Clifford had committed adultery with Angie Wellbrook—she did not want to bring him into public calumny, and Edwin Druse did not attempt to persuade her so to do. Helen was all too ready to believe she had lost Clifford through her own fault. Even while she hated him, she loved him: and the same could be said of him, for her. But his pride was hurt. He would not forgive, and she would not hurt him further. And so he came out of the divorce the innocent, and she the guilty party, and it was in all the papers for the space of a whole week. I am sorry to say that Clifford Wexford was never averse to the publicity. He thought it would be good for business and so it was.
Angie’s father rang from Johannesburg and boomed down the line, “Glad to see you’re rid of that no-good wife of yours. It’ll cheer Angie up no end!” Which of course it did. That, and the amazing success of David Firkin’s paintings, which now hung on the trendiest walls in the land.
“See,” said Angie. “All that Old Master junk is out, out, out.”
At the custody proceedings, a month later, Helen was to wish she had fought harder. Clifford brought up various matters to prove her unsuitability as a mother; not just her initial attempt to abort Nell, which she had expected, but her father’s insanity—a man who cut up his own paintings with the garden shears could hardly be called sane—which she might have inherited, and Helen’s own tendency to gross sexual immorality. Moreover, Helen was practically an alcoholic—had she not attempted to justify her sinning with the co-respondent, Durrance, on the grounds that she’d had too much to drink? No, Nell’s mother was vain, feckless, hopeless, criminal. Moreover, Helen had no money; Clifford had. How did she mean to support a child? Had she not given up even her meager part-time job at the drop of a hat? Work? Helen? You’re joking!
Whichever way the poor girl turned, Clifford faced her, accusing, and so convincing she almost believed him herself. And what could she say against him? That he wanted Nell only to punish her? That all he would do would be to hand Nell over to the care of a nanny, that he was too busy to be a proper father to the child, that her, Helen’s, heart would break if her baby was taken away from her? Edwin Druse was not persuasive. And so Helen was branded in the eyes of the world, a second time, as a drunken trollop, and that was that. Clifford won the custody proceedings.
“Custody, Care and Control,” said the Judge. Clifford looked across the courtroom at Helen, and for the first time since the proceedings had begun actually met her eyes.
“Clifford!” she whispered, as a wife might whisper her husband’s name on his deathbed, and he heard, in spite of the babel all around, and responded in his heart. Rage and spite subsided, and he wished that somehow he could put the clock back, and he, she and Nell could be together again. He waited for Helen outside the court. He wanted just to talk to her, to touch her. She had been punished enough. But Angie came out before Helen, dressed in the miniest of mini leather skirts, and no one looked at her legs, just at the gold and diamond brooch she wore, worth at least a quarter of a million pounds sterling, and tucked her arm into his, and said, “Well, that’s an excellent outcome! You have the baby and you don’t have Helen. Laurence wasn’t the only one, you know,” and Clifford’s moment of weakness passed.
What happened to Laurence, you ask? Anne-Marie his wife forgave him—though she never forgave Helen—and they remarried a couple of years later. Some people are just unbearably frivolous. But by her one act of indiscretion Helen had lost husband, home and lover—which happens more often than I care to think—not to mention a child, and a friend, and a reputation too. And when Baby Nell took her first steps her mother was not there to see.
THE PRELUDE TO DISASTER
POOR CLIFFORD! NOW, READER, you may be surprised to hear me speak thus sympathetically of Clifford, who has behaved to Helen in a cruel and disagreeable way. She had been silly, it was true, but she was only twenty-three, and Clifford, within a month or so of marriage, had been paying more attention to Leonardo’s than to her, and she had been made jealous of Angie, as we know, and Laurence was as dark and mirthful as Clifford was fair and serious, and Laurence tempted her, and she had failed to resist temptation, just once, though it must be faced that the episode on his office couch might well have blossomed into something richer and less sordid, left to its own devices, and without Anne-Marie’s furious hammer-blows to the relationship. Many another husband would have forgiven his wife for just such an error, sulked and grieved for a month or so and then forgotten, and just gotten on with life. Not Clifford. Poor Clifford, I say, simply because he could not forgive, let alone forget.
Poor Clifford, because even though he hated Helen, he longed for her bright presence around him, and was left with Angie, who wore miniskirts although her legs were bad and unfashionable brooches just because they were worth millions, and whose white mink coat seemed ostentatious rather than warm and becoming. And who, if Clifford tried to exercise the quite reasonable rights of the newly divorced man, and play the field a little—and there was no shortage of intelligent, beautiful and charming women waiting to snap Clifford up—would ring up her father in Johannesburg (never using her own phone) and start persuading him to shift his investment out of the uncertainties of the Art World and into the certainties of The Distillers’ Company or Armalite Inc. So, poor Clifford! He was not happy.
And poor Nell, who had to get used to new faces and new ways, for now she lived in a great polished nursery with a nice enough Nanny and a doting grandmother and grandfather to visit her—but where was her mother? Her little lower lip quivered quite a lot, in those early days, but even a baby can be brave and proud; she would make an effort to smile and perform, and who around was there to fully appreciate her loss? The ins and outs of a child’s psyche were not so discussed and considered then as now.
“Don’t pick her up,” Cynthia would say to Nanny, on the rare occasions when Nell cried in the night. “Let her cry herself out. She’ll soon lose the habit.” That was the way she’d
reared Clifford, after all, in the manner of the times; and sure enough, Clifford had learned not to give way to grief or fear, but whether it had done him any good was another matter. Fortunately Nanny had been trained in Dr. Spock, and took no notice.
“Just as soon as I can get it together,” Clifford said to his mother, “she’ll come to live with me.” But of course he was busy. Weeks turned into months.
And still poorer Helen! She lived with her parents in the months following the divorce, and it was not easy. John Lally was gaunter than ever with all-pervasive rage, and I-told-you-so’s, and inclined more than ever to blame Helen’s mother for everything that had gone wrong, that was going wrong, and was about to go wrong. Evelyn’s eyes would be red and puffy every morning and Helen knew that this too was her fault. She could hear him through the wall.
“Why didn’t you stop her marrying him, you fool? My granddaughter in the hands of that rogue, that villain, and you practically handed her over? Did you hate your own daughter so much? Hate me? Or was it jealousy, because she’s young and starting out and you’re old and finished?”
Oddly, while denying that Helen was his daughter, he laid full claim to Nell as his granddaughter. And yet, you know, while his wife and daughter grieved under his roof, John Lally, inspired by sheer spleen, painted three splendid paintings in as many months—one of an overflowing rain barrel in which floated a dead cat, one of a kite stuck in a dead tree, and one of a blocked gutter and assorted debris. All are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. John Lally owned them by contract to Leonardo’s, but was certainly not going to deliver them. No. Never. He hid them in the Applecore basement and it was lucky damp did not rot them, or rats devour them. Better his own basement, raged John Lally, than Leonardo’s vaults, where Clifford Wexford, adding insult to injury, had already put eight of his finest canvases.