by Fay Weldon
Fanny, I’m afraid, failed. A for Expediency, C for Integrity. Not a passing mark. No. Fanny agreed to move in with Clifford and forthwith ceased to discourage his plan to send off the dreadful Erich Blotton to kidnap Nell. In her defense I can only say that though she did not admire Clifford’s personality, or respect his social and financial dealings with the world, admiration and respect are not required when it comes to love. Fanny loved Clifford and that was that. Clifford, by the way, was a wonderful lover. Affectionate, forceful, not given to doubt. Have I mentioned that to you before? And so good-looking, of course. Anger with Helen had lately given his fair, stern face a kind of cavernous, hungry quality. I tell you, he was terrific in those days, not to mention photogenic. Of course the gossip columnists loved him.
But Fanny did at least insist that Clifford himself should meet Nell at the airport. And Clifford, having absorbed the dreadful word “Overdue,” went to have a glass of wine (he seldom drank spirits) in the Executive Lounge (he had useful friends in airports just as he had them everywhere). So he watched the Arrivals Board from a comfortable armchair, but it did not make him more comfortable in his mind. No. If the truth were known, he could scarcely breathe from anxiety, but he did not let it show on his face. Presently “Overdue” changed to “Kindly Contact ZARA Desk.” The words took up three lines on the display board and put all the other listings out of kilter. The word “kindly” was of course surplus, and for that reason the more ominous.
Clifford looked at the crowd milling around the ZARA Airlines Desk and knew that the worst had occurred. He did not join the crowd. He went back into the Executive Lounge and phoned Fanny. Fanny came at once.
It was left to Fanny, later, to call Helen, and tell her what had happened.
KIDNAP!
NOW HELEN, AS YOU may imagine, was in considerable distress already. She had arrived at Miss Pickford’s nursery school at 3:15 to find Nell gone.
“Her father’s chauffeur came to collect her,” said Miss Pickford, “in a Rolls Royce,” as if this latter fact excused and explained everything.
In those more innocent days—we are talking about the late Sixties—child molestation and abuse was a rarer thing than it is today, or at least we were not stunned by example after dreadful example on our TV screens and newspapers, and it did not occur to Helen that what we now know as a “stranger” had taken Nell. She knew at once that this terrible deed was Clifford’s doing, that Nell was at least physically safe. She called Simon at the Sunday Times, and her lawyer, and reproached Miss Pickford heartily, and only then settled down to weep.
“How can he do it?” she asked friends, her mother, acquaintances, everyone on the phone, that late afternoon. “How can he be so wicked? Poor little Nell! Well, she will grow up to hate him, that is the only comforting thing about this whole horrible affair. I want Nell back at once and I want Clifford put in prison!”
Simon, who had come home at once to look after his distressed wife, said calmly that it would do no good to have Nell’s father in prison. Nell certainly wouldn’t want that. And Cuthbert Way, the lawyer, came over at once, abandoning his other cases—Helen was stunningly beautiful in this the fourth month of her pregnancy—and said that, since he imagined Clifford had taken Nell to Switzerland, it was going to be difficult to get Nell back at all, let alone Clifford put in prison. That put the cat among the pigeons.
Switzerland! It was the first Helen had heard of Clifford and Switzerland. She didn’t read the gossip columns; she had been too busy putting together the pretty, comfortable house in Muswell Hill and settling Nell in at the nursery, and arguing about access with Clifford’s solicitors, and wondering whether or not she was pregnant and buying what in those days was called “junk” and in these days is called Victoriana or even “later antiques”; and one way and another, she told herself and everyone that evening, she’d had no time to look in the gossip columns and discover what everyone else apparently knew—that Clifford Wexford had been put in charge of Leonardo’s Geneva, and had a new modern house built at vast expense on the lakeside, no doubt complete with nursery.
The reason Helen didn’t read the gossip columns was not the ones she gave. It was, as we know, that it still hurt her to read about Clifford’s latest inammorata. She wasn’t exactly jealous—here she was, after all, happily married to Simon—she just couldn’t bear it. It hurt. Simon knew, of course, that Helen still loved Clifford, just as Fanny knew that Clifford still loved Helen, but obviously neither pressed the point. What good would it do but harm to themselves?
Cuthbert Way, the lawyer, said he would of course proceed through the international courts, but it would take time. Helen stopped weeping and protesting her outrage. She became deathly white; she could hardly speak. Shock and outrage were giving way now to piercing maternal anxiety. She knew that something terrible, terrible was happening. (And it was, oddly enough, at just about this time that turbulence hit ZOE 05 and the cracks in her frame widened and deepened and turned into those death-dealing splits.) But of course the misery and anxiety caused, quite reasonably, by Nell’s abduction served to mask the other, more instinctive, maternal awareness.
Then came the phone call from Fanny. It reanimated Helen as nothing else seemed able to do.
“Who? Fanny who?” (A hand over the phone) “Clifford’s latest, everyone! He’s reduced to his secretaries now. How dare she call! What a bitch!”
And then the news. I shan’t dwell on this part. It is too terrible. We know that Nell is still alive. Helen does not. I can’t bear to be with her at this moment. But I believe that hereafter Helen went more calmly and kindly through life, and was less given to vituperation. Except of course where Clifford himself, the cause of her grief, was concerned.
LIVING PROPERLY AND WELL
THE DEATH OF A child is not something to be joked about, or laughed at. It is an event from which a parent does not recover; life is never quite the same again, nor should be, for now it incorporates an unnatural event. We do not expect to outlive our children, nor do we want to. On the other hand, life must go on, if only for the sake of those who are left, and, what is more, it is our duty to learn to enjoy it again. For what do we regret for those untimely dead, but the opportunity to live with enjoyment? If we are to give proper meaning and honor to their death, and our grief, we must enjoy the life we, and not they, are privileged to have, and live thereafter properly and well, without wranglings or rancor.
Alas, of all the people in the world, Clifford and Helen were perhaps the least likely to live their lives properly and well. And though in truth Nell, as we know, was not in fact dead but sleeping soundly in a soft, safe though lumpy, bed not a hundred miles away at the time when Clifford and Helen both arrived at the scene of the aircrash, we could still have wished the apparent tragedy to have united them in mutual grief, not driven them further apart in bitterness and hate.
“I’m sorry,” Clifford could have said. “If I hadn’t behaved the way I did it would never have happened. Nell would still be alive.”
“If only I hadn’t been unfaithful,” Helen could have said, “we would still be together now, and Nell still with us.” But no. They faced each other on those sad sands, she flown in on a mercy flight from London, he chauffeur-driven from Paris, and argued. Both were far too gone in grief to weep; but not, it seems, to quarrel. In the background, rescue teams worked with cranes, diving equipment, tractors, with the useless ambulances standing by. And as the tide retreated inch by inch, it lay bare inch by inch the grisly relics of the crash.
“Not a single survivor,” Clifford said to Helen. “If you’d been reasonable she could have come out by boat and train, she would never have been on the plane. I hope you go to hell. I hope you live in hell from now on, knowing that.”
“You were stealing her,” Helen said, quite calmly. “That is why Nell is dead. And as for hell, you came to me out of it, and dragged me down into it, and now you have destroyed Nell.”
She didn’t scream or hi
t; perhaps being pregnant anaesthetized her feelings, just a little. I hope so. Later, Helen was to say that short stretch of time when she believed Nell was dead was the most miserable and despairing of all her days but, even so, she knew that, for the unborn baby’s sake, she could not let herself receive the full force of the disaster. She did not see how, otherwise, she could have stayed alive. Grief would, quite simply, have killed her.
“Go back to your mistresses and your money,” she said. “It’s nothing to you that Nell’s dead. Crocodile tears!”
“Go back to your whoring and your dwarf hack journalist,” he said. “I pity the baby! I expect you will murder this one too.” By “dwarf hack journalist” he meant, of course, Simon, who, though one of the most distinguished political columnists of his day, was certainly not a tall man. Helen, at five-foot-seven, was the same height as her new husband.
And so they parted, Clifford back to his chauffeured Rolls Royce; Helen to sit by herself on the desolate beach and mourn. Clifford had refused to go into the identification hut.
“I am not interested in her remnants,” he said. “Nell is dead and that’s that.”
He did not know why he had come, except that action was better than inaction, in the first stunned days of grief.
Simon had said to Helen, “You are not to go in. Let me,” and, while she had sat outside, searched amongst the scraps for traces of the missing child. The authorities like bodies to be assembled, named, accounted for, and disposed of with true religious formality. We must all, past and present, be recorded, logged and numbered, and our story told, lest the wild proliferation of humanity reduce us to despair. And besides, there is the question of insurance.
PUZZLES
ARTHUR HOCKNEY WAS OUT of Nigeria via Harvard and New York. He was very tall, very broad and elegantly black. He traveled the world for Trans-Continental Brokers as an insurance investigator. If a ship sunk in the China Seas, he’d turn up to find out why. If a presidential palace was destroyed in Central Africa, there would Arthur Hockney be, assessing villainy or genuine loss. Where he went, crowds parted, and gave up their secrets. So large, strong, shrewd was he, so adept at tracing and outfacing the sharks and vipers of the world, that only the good and the guiltless seemed prepared to argue with him at all. Trans-Continental Brokers paid him well. Very well. He had had some conversations with Clifford, Helen and Simon. He had seen the tail section swung by crane out of the shallow water a little upshore; noticed the tracery of cracks typical of metal fatigue, rather than the gross fractures of impact; observed the two intact seats, their seat belts unfastened. Perhaps the seats had simply been unoccupied. But why then was the ashtray of one full to overflowing, the torn top of a packet of children’s candy under the floor of the other? Careless cleaning by ZARA Airlines, or occupancy during the flight? He would be happier if the body of Mr. E. Blotton—to whom his attention was directed, inasmuch as he alone of the passengers had bought extra flight insurance, and whose character and profession he knew—had been identified. But it had not. However, he would have to await the arrival of the unfortunate Mrs. Blotton to be sure. And where was the body of little Nell Wexford? Out to sea? Possible. Yet the man and the child had been booked into the nonsmoking section; all the neighboring bodies had been found, more or less intact. Again, he would have to wait. The child’s father had refused to enter the identification hut. Well, he could understand that, considering the circumstances in which the child was on the plane. And no matter how tactfully it was arranged, how much obliterating plastic sheeting used, the process of identification could only be traumatic. All the same, most parents preferred to see, and know, rather than believe the unbelievable, on hearsay. The child’s stepfather was in there now—he had kept his wife away, perhaps rightly, perhaps not. To stand amidst the evidence of mortality, the bits and pieces of human flesh, the scraps of property, the trash left when the soul has departed, soon ceases to be gruesome; rather it becomes evidence of the wonder and value of life. (Or so Arthur Hockney had come to see it. Well, he had to, didn’t he. It was that or give up a job which involved him as much with the dead as the living.) Look, strange things happened! Bodies simply went missing. For all Arthur Hockney knew, the child might have been snatched up by a golden eagle and carried away to a Swiss mountaintop, Blotton’s body dragged out to sea by a giant squid. Because a thing was improbable didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Not for Arthur Hockney the notion that the simplest and most likely explanation was the right one, and it was for this reason that he was Trans-Continental’s highest-paid and most successful investigator. That, and because of what he sometimes referred to dismissively as his sixth sense. He just sometimes knew what it was unreasonable for him to know. He didn’t like it but there it was. There was some pattern to human affairs observable by him and apparently no one else.
Arthur went over to where Helen sat, so quietly and sadly, in that gray place, on that gray day. She turned her face toward him. He thought she was both the loveliest and the saddest woman he had ever seen. He did not let his thoughts go beyond that. She was distressed, pregnant, a married woman: out of bounds. All the same, he knew he would see her again, many times, that she would be part of his life. He tried not to think about this, either.
“They haven’t found her yet, have they,” she said, surprising him with the lightness in her voice.
“No.”
“Well, Mr. Hockney, they won’t. Nell isn’t dead.” The ashen misery seemed to drain away even as he looked. Perhaps she found some strength in him, used his clear eyes momentarily to see through to the truth of things, shared his gift for prescience, just long enough for it to work. She actually smiled. A cold evening wind had sprung up and swirled eddies of drier sand along the damp beach, making the prettiest of pretty, timeless patterns. “I expect you think I’m mad,” she said. “Because how could anyone live through that?” And she indicated the mangled wreckage of ZOE 05, still strewn so horribly all about.
Hard to believe that the beach would ever again be a playground for children with buckets and spades—but of course eventually it was. That same spot is today the site of the big campsite “Canvas Beach Safari.” I think myself it is a desolate place; somehow tragedy seeps through from other groundsheets and makes even the sunniest day melancholy, and the sea seems to sigh and whisper, and when the wind gets up it’s a lament—but there! Northern France shouldn’t pretend to be the Mediterranean coast, the climate just isn’t right for camping holidays. Perhaps that’s all it is!
“People live through amazing things,” he said cautiously. “A stewardess once fell twenty thousand feet out of an aircraft, landed in a snow drift, and lived to tell the tale.”
“Her father thinks she’s dead,” said Helen. “But then he would. And so does Simon. So does everyone. So I expect I am mad.”
He asked if her daughter had liked Dolly Mixtures.
“Not had liked,” said Helen, furiously. “Does she like? No, she doesn’t. She has more sense,” and then she began to weep and he apologized. It was the kind of detail, he knew, that always wrenched the heart of the bereaved—the little, everyday, apparently unimportant things, the likes and dislikes of the dead which in retrospect add up to the sum of a personality, but which in life went unremarked. But it had to be asked, though the answer made Nell’s survival yet more unlikely.
It had been, of course, Mr. Blotton’s instinct to pick out; in passing, the very candy Nell most scorned (“Dolly mixtures? I am not a dolly!”) to keep her quiet on the flight. As if, like some recalcitrant animal, she had needed to be kept quiet in the first place! And then, because she made a face, Mr. Blotton had eaten them all, every one, himself, to get even. What a disagreeable man he was. The more I think of him the more disagreeable he gets.
“I don’t know what I think,” she said, when she had stopped crying. Her faith was slipping away. He felt he had no right to restore it; what kind of proof was conviction? She shivered, and he placed her coat more securely around her s
houlders, and led her back to sit in his hired car, out of the wind, and went back to be amongst the perplexing but unperplexed dead. Mrs. Blotton, he was told, had arrived. He spoke to her. She was a plain, respectable woman in her early forties. She had sandy eyelashes and prominent blue eyes. She did not like black men, he could tell, even a black man such as he, who looked so like Sydney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sheer good looks, a fine suit, and a persuasive, educated voice could usually overcome the most stubborn racial prejudice. But there were always a few women, he knew, especially of Mrs. Blotton’s type, pale, Northern women, inhibited, who could never overcome theirs. Well, they didn’t even try: black to them meant a fearful, rampant sexuality. If only they knew just how discreet, how vulnerable, how reticent, how dependent on true love his sexuality was, and how he longed for that rare, releasing emotion—but this was the house of death, not life, and their miserable racism their problem, hardly his.