by Fay Weldon
The tail descended into the shallows below, taking its time. There was no one about. The scattered remnants of the rest of ZOE 05 settled into mud and sand some quarter of a mile upshore. Mr. Blotton and Nell sat shocked, but safe at least from sudden death by air disaster. Presently Mr. Blotton undid his seat belt, and tested the depth of the water, and found it only knee-deep. He carried Nell to shore. Then he put her down. She promptly sat down.
“Come on,” he said, “don’t idle!” and set her on her feet again, and half carried, half pushed her to the shore-road, and then they started walking to the nearest village.
Erich Blotton was an opportunist, no doubt about it. ZOE 05 had not disappeared for more than fifteen minutes from the radar screens, and the search for her remains was no more than eight minutes old, than he was in the bank in the little seaside town of Lauzerk-sur-Manche, changing Swiss francs into French francs, with little Nell standing beside him. Nell was dazed rather than distressed, having never walked so far so fast on her little legs before. Apart from a limp (due to a couple of nasty blisters from walking in wet shoes) and his still damp trousers, Mr. Blotton looked much like any traveling salesman, and certainly not the survivor of an aircrash which had killed 173 people. And Nell just looked like a little girl who’d been paddling when she shouldn’t, and sat down in the water, and been scolded.
A few minutes later sirens were to sound, and all the emergency vehicles that that part of the coast could muster were on their way to the scene of the crash, and newspapermen, film and TV and radio crews too, on their way from Paris, and then from all over the world—and who was to remember one slightly-limping, bad-tempered man, accompanied by a very little girl, changing money in the bank that afternoon?
“Hurry up,” Mr. Blotton hissed at the little girl, now dragging her after him to the Paris bus which was standing in the square, about to depart. He had lost his cigarettes.
“I’m trying,” she said in her little voice, and it would have wrung anyone’s heart but Mr. Blotton’s.
The thing was, reader, that before Erich Blotton had boarded ZOE 05 he’d stopped by one of those airport desks—which were everywhere at the time, but since seem to have vanished from the scene, or at any rate are now more discreetly positioned—which sold flight insurance. For five pounds you could insure your life for two million pounds, over and above any claim you (that is to say, your relatives) might make against the airline. Two million pounds! Mr. Blotton had taken out just such insurance, making the amount payable to Ellen, his wife—mailing the receipt to her in the envelope provided just before boarding the plane. He was a nervous traveler and, as we have seen, was right to be so. One cannot, in this life, rely on a million-to-one chance to always turn up trumps. That one should float to earth, and not hurtle headfirst—
Mr. Blotton’s mind moved fast. Even as he sat blinking in the tail section of the ruined aircraft, and it sank gently deeper and deeper into the tidal mud, his plan of action had been clear to him. He would be presumed dead. Excellent! Then he would hide out—and that would suit him well enough, a lawsuit or two were turning nasty—until Ellen had claimed the insurance money. Then he would send for her; she would forgive him and come: he would take her to South America, where the eyes of the law get blurry, and live happily ever after, living it up. Not that it was in Mrs. Blotton’s nature to do much living-up—she disapproved vigorously of smoking, drinking and foreigners. But perhaps the hot climate and so much money would make her feel more generous? Erich Blotton loved his wife and wanted her approval of his profession, but it was only grudgingly forthcoming. The Blotton marriage was childless, so at least the wife could understand the husband’s motivation; that is to say, “If I can’t have my own children, I’ll steal yours!” It is the duty of a loving and loyal wife always to see her husband’s occupation in the best light, and she did her best.
“What am I to do with you?” Mr. Blotton asked Nell, as the two sped toward Paris on the bus. Here, in the existence of the child, was his only problem, the one obstacle to his plans. Going on four is old enough to blurt out information; but alas too young to bully or bribe into silence. A difficult age, from some points of view.
“I want to go to the bathroom” was all she said, and, only then, after a day in which she had been kidnapped and survived an aircrash, did she begin to cry. Erich Blotton wanted not just to cover her mouth with his hand, but to keep it there, smothering her altogether. Only he could hardly do such a thing in a public bus. But he could see the value of the idea—he could easily enough take the child to some small French hotel under a false passport (Mr. Blotton carried three such), suffocate her in her sleep and then destroy the passport and vanish into the Parisian crowd. The child wouldn’t suffer. She’d know nothing about it. What sort of future would she have had, had she lived? Mr. Blotton felt a little toward living children as Dr. Runcorn felt toward those unborn—that sometimes they might simply be better off out of existence altogether. Well, vets feel that about animals, and no one reproaches them. If it suffers—end its life! Let’s all have a little peace; let us be spared the misery of other creatures.
“La pauvre petite!” said a smart French lady, leaning forward from the seat behind them, so smart indeed she looked as if she ran a multinational conglomerate and wasn’t just a provincial housewife on her way to Paris. But that’s the French for you! “Tu veux faire pipi?”
Nell stopped crying and smiled and nodded, understanding if not the words at least the tone of voice, so enchanting the French lady with her smile that the latter made the driver pull in at a lay-by aux toilettes, and accompanied her while Mr. Blotton sat sulking and seething in his seat. But what could he do?
“My mummy will be missing me,” said Nell to the lady. “I want to go home. We went for a ride in an airplane but it fell out of the sky.”
But, for all her glamour, the French lady did not speak English, and simply took her back to her seat beside Mr. Blotton, and the coach proceeded, the driver muttering under his breath, and two minutes, five seconds behind schedule, which in France is very bad indeed. But who knew who else had been listening?
“Where are we going?” Nell tugged at Mr. Blotton’s sleeve. “Please can we go home?”
“Get lost!” said Mr. Blotton.
“Too dangerous now to kill her,” thought Mr. Blotton. “We’ve been noticed.” And besides, where would be the profit in it? A dead body, even a small one, even a child’s, is all nuisance, all expense. It has to be disposed of, one way or another, and that costs. (These days, of course, you can sell off bits for illegal spare-part surgery, but remember we’re talking about twenty years back, before spare-part surgery was all the rage, and just as well, considering Mr. Blotton’s nature.)
As it was, and fortunately for Nell, Erich Blotton hit upon another solution. He would lose little Nell the best and most profitable way he knew how.
GETTING LOST!
NELL SLEPT THAT NIGHT in the dreariest room she had ever encountered; it was in the Algerian quarter of Paris, where Mr. Blotton had friends. Wallpaper peeled from the wall and little blind insects swarmed in and out of every possible crack. There was only a blanket on the bed and no sheets. She slept soundly, nevertheless, her hunger quenched by hot, peppery soup. Mr. Blotton put her to bed but he was gone when she woke. She was glad in one way, but lonely in another. She woke only once and cried for her mother a little, but presently a young dark woman came in and hushed her and spoke in a language Nell didn’t understand. But she seemed kind and Nell was not afraid.
Maria—for that was her name—looked through the pockets of Nell’s clothes and came across a note from the nursery school about an outing to the theater and crumpled it up.
“Don’t do that,” said Nell. “Miss Pickford will be cross.” But the woman just went on doing it.
Then the dark woman found the emerald pendant. Nell had forgotten all about it.
“You mustn’t throw that away,” said Nell. “It’s my mummy’s.”
“Ça va,” she said. “Ça va bien.”
With just such a teddy bear had many an unsuspecting child smuggled drugs through customs! The neck join was hard to find, except for those who knew enough to look for it.
“Pauvre,” said Maria. “Pauvre petite,” and another tear fell. Many a criminal, many a whore, waxes sentimental over the misfortunes of children. Perhaps they see themselves looking out of the child’s eyes? Nevertheless, it must be said that if Maria had taken and sold the pendant, she could have earned her freedom from the brothel—for it was in such a place that Nell now found herself—and lived a decent life. But then again, perhaps in Maria’s heart she didn’t really want that either, but was quite content to live as she did. At any rate she was good to Nell, of that we can be sure. Nell went back to sleep and slept soundly—which was more than her mother did that night, or any of the relatives of those lost on ZOE 05. Maria didn’t sleep either; nighttime, after all, was her working day. She did well that night, and thought perhaps it was God’s reward for her kindness to the child.
Mr. Blotton slept soundly, as anyone does who has suffered a severe shock to the system—a black, deep, dreamless sleep. Let us not suppose him to be immune to the effects of drastic events, just because he is a criminal. So stunned was he, indeed, that the truly amazing nature of his drifting journey from heaven to hell scarcely dawned upon him until the following morning. Then, when he rose from his grimy bed, and pulled on yesterday’s soiled shirt, and scraped away at his face in the cracked mirror, using the razor Maria used for her legs, he asked her—
“Why was I saved and the others not?” But Maria did not know what he was talking about. How could she? But Mr. Blotton saw God’s hand in it, and may have been right, except (in my opinion) it was Nell that God was saving, not Erich Blotton, who just happened to be sitting next to the child. But of course Mr. Blotton could not be expected to see that. He did make two gestures of thanks to God during the day. The first was to resolve to give up smoking; the second was to refrain from selling Nell to a friend (such friends!) who ran a child porno network in Europe. Instead he sold her at a rather cheaper price to an acquaintance who ran a scheme for illegal adoption. He left Nell in Maria’s care and went to see him. “Female, white, healthy and pretty,” was all Mr. Blotton had to say and Nell was snapped up at once, sight unseen, for a childless couple who lived in a château outside Cherbourg, and who were not in a position to adopt legally. The acquaintance took ten percent commission and Erich Blotton received one hundred thousand francs—enough to keep him comfortably while he laid low and waited for ZARA Airlines to pay out the insurance money.
“One way or another,” Erich Blotton said to Maria, “you could say I’d fallen on my feet,” and he laughed uproariously, which I must say was not something he usually did.
And so Nell was out of the brothel and into her new home by nightfall, and put to bed in her own turret bedroom, and what if the branches of great trees rubbed against latticed windows and the walls were of ancient unrendered stone, and little spiders hopped and danced all around on the end of silken threads, at least the hands which put her to bed, man and wife, new father, new mother, were loving and not at war with one another.
OVERDUE!
CLIFFORD, MEANWHILE, HAD GONE to the Geneva airport to meet Erich Blotton and his daughter off the plane. He had arrived a little late and was shocked to see, punched upon the arrivals board, in relation to ZOE 05’s flight from London, the ominous word OVERDUE. Clifford had intended to send his secretary Fanny to meet Nell—Fanny of the white swan neck, ethereal face and Master’s Degree in Art History, always obliging! Clifford hated hanging about anywhere, let alone at airports, doing nothing either particularly useful or pleasurable in the company of just ordinary people. But Fanny had told him, in her gentle, determined voice, that Clifford must go himself, that the sooner Nell saw a familiar face the better.
“It is not often a little girl is stolen by a total stranger from her nursery school,” Fanny said primly. “She may well be traumatized.”
It will not surprise you to learn that Fanny was Clifford’s current mistress; Clifford would, after all, need someone to live in and look after Nell, once stolen. He would be busier than ever setting up Leonardo’s Geneva, with all the entertaining and socializing that that entailed: he could see he would not have much time for a child. It was no surprise to Fanny either. She was no fool, for all she looked so soft and gentle.
“But you don’t love me, Clifford,” said Fanny, when he raised his head from the goose-down pillow, a week or so before Nell was due to fly in, and asked her to live with him. The proposal—if so we can call it—came when Fanny was spending not a night, but part of a night—it was Clifford’s custom to send her home by taxi at two in the morning. They were in the bedroom of Clifford’s newly built house just outside Geneva. The architect was world-famous, the house all curves, angles, steel and glass. (Leonardo’s paid.) It was perched on the edge of a mountain, overlooking the lake, and was armed like a fortress. All mixed up with the switches which remotely controlled the food processors, the air-conditioners, the baths, the vacuum cleaners, spotlights, sliding windows, glass roofs and so forth, were the switches for a host of electronic security devices. Clifford had to have them. His insurers insisted that he did. Clifford, to his credit, would rather have lived simply, but when in the country of the rich it is only polite to keep their customs. Moreover, he had finally brought his ex-father-in-law’s paintings out of storage and now at last could hang the major John Lally canvases properly, together with a Peter Blake, a Tilson, an Auerbach, and a couple of fine Rembrandt etchings. All had to be protected. Keeping such company could only improve the value of the Lallys. His wife had proved a dead loss, but his father-in-law would keep him in his old age.
Clifford kept a Lally painting of a dead duck and a mad-eyed hunter above his bed. It reminded him, he told inquirers, of the time his ex-father-in-law had burst in upon him and Helen and discovered them in bed together. Well, many a traumatic occasion later becomes an after-dinner tale. It is a form of therapy in which the talkative often indulge, and I do not exempt myself. Clifford still spoke bitterly about the divorce, although everyone (who was anyone) knew it had been he who instituted proceedings, and that he had not been deflected one whit by Helen’s tears and obvious repentance. None so irrational as a man betrayed: the more so if he’s accustomed to betraying! Now, beneath the dead duck, Clifford said to Fanny:
“I love you as much as I love anyone, which isn’t much. If I had to choose between a Francis Bacon and you I daresay I’d choose the Bacon! But I need someone to run the house for Nell, so I’m asking you. I’m sure we’ll get on.”
“Nell should stay where she is,” said Fanny, briskly, “at home with her mother.” She was not afraid of Clifford, and never took too much notice of the unkind things he said: well, she couldn’t and still have stayed. “A child of three needs a mother, not a father.”
“Her mother is feckless, idle, an alcoholic and a slut,” said Clifford. You could tell he didn’t like Helen, but also that he still loved her. Fanny sighed. It was always the subtext of Clifford’s words which upset her, not the words themselves.
“A mother is a mother,” she said, getting out of bed and starting to dress. She had lovely long slim legs, slimmer and longer than Helen’s. If Helen had a bad point, it was her legs, which were distinctly stocky now she was moving into her late twenties. She often wore trousers. Fanny, in those liberated days when women wore anything that took their fancy, only the sillier, the silkier, and the frondier the better, cou
ld wear miniskirts and hot-pants to advantage. It was when she turned up at the office in these latter and Clifford remonstrated, saying the good burghers of the canton would not approve, that their affair began. Clifford did not make a habit of sleeping with his secretaries: on the contrary. It was just that she was there, he was in a foreign country, and she had a Master’s Degree in Art History and her judgment on paintings was sound, and he could at least have a decent conversation with her, which was more than he could say for the heiresses of the Geneva jet set. She did not, of course, have Clifford’s flair for combining art and business, but then who could?
“You’ve gone doo-lally-tap, Clifford,” said Fanny. “Stealing a child is a very wicked thing to do.”
“How can you steal something that is yours to begin with?” he demanded. “In the same spirit that I would rescue a rotting Leonardo from a damp church, and not stop to ask permission, I’m rescuing this child from its mother. All you mean is, Fanny, you’re jealous and possessive and don’t want to share me with Nell!”
Clifford believed, as does many a man, that he was central to the lives of all the women around him, and that those women, although capable of emotional judgment, were not of moral judgment. And I am sorry to say that Fanny, as if bearing him out, gave in, laughed lightly and said, “I expect you’re right, Clifford.” For Fanny was well aware that her living with Clifford was conditional on Nell’s presence in the house. And how much better to live at Numéro Douze Avenue des Pins, with its spectacular view and its stretches of parquet flooring and its heated swimming pool reflecting the icy Alps above, and its servants, than in the small apartment above a delicatessen in downtown Geneva, which was all her salary at Leonardo’s enabled her to afford. For although Leonardo’s paid its chairman, and its directors, and its investors splendidly, it seemed to think that its ordinary employees—that is to say, the women—should balance the privilege of working at Leonardo’s against low wages and be grateful. (But that’s the way it is for women out there in the world, especially if they are working in publishing or the arts, or for the public good, teaching or nursing—as I am sure many of you know to your cost.) And Fanny knew well enough that there were many just as beautiful, just as talented girls as she, all too eager to take her job as personal assistant to the great, the famous, the glamorous whiz kid Clifford Wexford, and to do it for even less than she. And that once you are emotionally involved with your boss, you had better do as he asks, because he will no longer behave rationally about the typing, the filing, and so on and may confuse your work with you, and you’ll be out on your ear.