by Fay Weldon
The sights in the hut seemed to make Mrs. Blotton angry rather than distressed. She limped. She was wearing new shoes. Hard, cheap, discount shoes—not the kind a woman rushes out to buy when she’s just illegally contrived two million dollars. Then she would either spend lavishly, unable to control herself, or not at all, for a long time, out of guilt as much as prudence. No. She had no idea, she said, and he believed her, why her husband should have been on a flight to Geneva; she’d known nothing about it until this peculiar Insurance Note had come through the mail slot the day after the crash, with Erich’s handwriting on the envelope. No, she hadn’t looked at it carefully, only got as far as the flight number. She’d seen the crash on the news, thought anyone who traveled on ZARA Airlines deserved what they got; the flight number had stuck in her mind. And Erich hadn’t come home when expected. So she’d phoned Heathrow. And the worst conclusion had been the right one. Her husband had been on ZOE 05. He was dead. Of course, he was dead. Why did she have to go through this grisly formality? And who are you, anyway, asking these questions? Not quite “go back and swing in the jungle” but almost.
“People do survive aircrashes,” he said.
“What do you know?” she asked savagely. She pointed at a male hand, poking out of the plastic wrap which discreetly hid the severed flesh. The French did these things properly.
“That’s his,” she said. “That’s Erich’s.”
Arthur looked at the coding on the identification tag. The hand had already been claimed, but tentatively. Yet it had come from the front section, probably Row 5, where Blotton and the child had been booked.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“Would I say it if I wasn’t?” Well, yes, he thought, if two million pounds were at stake—though he didn’t think she appreciated the sum involved—or just to get out of the place, or get back home and cry. Even the Ellen Blottons of the world were entitled to cry.
“Tell me,” he asked, “is your husband a heavy smoker?”
“Him? Certainly not. I won’t have a cigarette in the house.”
Her own hands were nicotine-free. She had surprisingly white, small, delicate hands for one so practical, sandy and plain. Again, the detail affected her. She broke down and wept, and was taken out of the hut. The hand was re-tagged as belonging to Erich Blotton. Right age, sex, racial type, without nicotine stains. Why then did he still doubt?
He approached Simon Cornbrook, now leaning against the door, defeated.
“You’ve done enough,” Arthur said. “If you haven’t found anything by now, you won’t. Come out of here.”
“I suppose the body might have been carried out to sea,” said Simon, “after all, the body weight—just because the others—”
“Quite,” said Arthur. “Well, it will turn up, I expect.”
“I wish there had been something,” said Simon. “Even a shoe, a ribbon. My wife just won’t believe Nell’s dead, I know she won’t.”
He drove the Cornbrooks back to Paris and the airport. He filed a report saying there were no suspicious factors relating to the disaster. A strip of cardboard saying “Dolly Mixture,” a full ashtray and two missing bodies, were hardly enough to suggest otherwise. All he had was the conviction he could not quite get rid of, and which Helen had somehow picked out of his head. When he left them in the Departure Lounge, he heard Helen say, “She isn’t dead. If she was dead I’d feel it,” and Simon reply, “Darling, face facts, for all our sakes,” and he felt responsible.
When, a week later, Arthur Hockney found a message from Helen at his hotel—he was attending a Conference on Tax Evasion organized by Fortune—asking him to meet her, he was not surprised. He had known it would happen. He dropped a note at a box number, as she suggested, and arranged lunch. He imagined she wished to keep the meeting secret from her husband. He did not let his mind speculate further.
Arthur was already in the restaurant when Helen arrived. He stood up as she approached. People turned to stare. He made the tables, the chairs, seem small and impossibly refined, the strawed bottles of Chianti hanging in clusters for decoration somehow absurd. Helen was dressed in dark blue and trying to be unnoticeable, but of course she was not.
“Arthur,” she said, lightly and quickly. She was nervous. “I can call you Arthur, can’t I? And you must call me Helen. Phoning strange men, making assignations, it must seem odd! It’s just I don’t want to worry Simon. He’d be furious—well, not furious, upset—it’s just I know Nell is alive, I know she’s all right, except she’s missing me, and I want you to find her. I’ll employ you. You’re freelance, aren’t you? I’ll pay anything. It’s just we mustn’t let my husband know.” Ah, the habits of Applecore Cottage, still so strong!
“Helen,” he said, and found the word new, strange and wonderful, “I can’t do it. It wouldn’t be responsible.”
“But why not? I don’t understand.” She had ordered a mushroom crepe but left it untouched. He devoured a porterhouse steak and chips. The Queen Mother, asked for a word of advice to those about to embark on public life, replied, “When you see a toilet, use it.” Arthur Hockney, whose work took him into jungles and up mountains and into the more desolate and often hungry places of the world, felt the same about a plateful of food. You never knew when you’d see one again. He took his time replying.
“Because to give you hope would be worse than a charlatan who offers a cancer cure for money, or a psychic who speaks from the grave to a widow, for a fee.”
“It wouldn’t be like that at all.” She was only a child herself. “Please!”
“In the face of common sense, in the face of my report to ZARA Airlines, how can I?”
If you come back to me and tell me she’s dead, I’ll believe it, I’ll accept it.”
“But you might not,” he said. He should never have given her hope in the first place, talked of stewardesses who survived falls of 20,000 feet. He felt to blame.
“It’s just somehow the word dead and the word Nell don’t go together,” she said, and now there were tears in her eyes. He was relieved to see them. “Perhaps Simon’s right, I have gone a bit mad. I need a psychiatrist. But I have to know. I have to be convinced. Don’t you see? To live with hope is worse than living without it. To watch Simon mourn, and yet be unable to mourn myself—it makes me feel wicked! Perhaps it’s just the new baby—my being pregnant? That being so full of life, I can’t receive death? Perhaps that’s all it is.”
“I’ll go back and look over the case,” he said. “I’ll open up inquiries again,” and hardly knew why he had consented to say it, except that Helen had asked him, and she was in such turmoil: unable to be unhappy, and that was a rare condition.
NO NEWS BEING GOOD NEWS
AS FOR NELL, SHE was as safe, well and happy as a child can be who finds herself well treated, loved and looked after, albeit in a strange land, by people who speak a foreign tongue. She missed her mother, her teacher, her stepfather and her father in that order, but presently seemed to forget them, as children will. Others took their place. And if Nell sometimes became pensive, while playing in the château grounds, or eating her supper on the patio in the evening sun, her new parents, the Marquis and Milady de Troite, looked at each other and hoped that soon she would forget altogether and be perfectly happy. Nell was their little jewel, their petite ange: they loved her.
They did not begrudge a franc of the money they had spent upon her. The de Troites were not in a position, for various reasons which will soon become clear, to formally and legally adopt a child. And in any case, in this period (in the Western World at least) of rising infertility, the right children were in short supply; certain children valued, above others, as dogs are, if the breed and temperament were right. But anything can be bought on the black market, anything. And Nell—well, what a beauty she was, with her blue eyes, her wide smile, her small, perfect features and thick fair hair, and her capacity to love, to forgive, and make the best of everything! She was cheap at the price.
&n
bsp; Nell learned French within a month or so, and, having no one to speak it with, soon forgot English. She remembered some things, as if they came from a dream—that once, in that dream life, she’d had another mother, and that her own name had been Nell, not Brigitte: but the dream faded. Just sometimes a disturbing flicker of memory would surface: where was Tuffin, her cat? Hadn’t there once been a Tuffin, little and gray? Where was Clifford, her daddy, with his thick blond hair? Papa Milord had almost no hair at all! (What I must tell you about the de Troites, reader, is that Papa Milord was eighty-two and Mama Milady was seventy-four. That was why they had trouble adopting!) But the memories only flickered, and were gone.
“Tout va bien, ma petite?” Milady would ask. Her neck was wrinkled, her lips thick with bright, bright lipstick, but she smiled, and loved.
“Très bien, Maman!” Nell hopped and danced about like the little pet she was. They ate in the kitchen—since the wind whistled through the dining-room ceiling so—on bread baked by Marthe, and vegetable soups, and tomato salads with fresh basil, and boeuf en daube aplenty—the de Troites’ teeth were not up to anything firm or hard—all of which suited Nell’s little body very well. The needs of the very young and the old often overlap. She did not cry or quarrel; there seemed so little to cry about, and no one to quarrel with: no one whose interests, in the household, seemed to be put above her own. An outsider, looking in, might have seen a little girl too quiet, too docile for her own good, but there were no outsiders to look in—they were not welcomed: in case, no doubt, they passed just such a judgment and invited the authorities in to see what they had seen. A child, however overtly happy and healthy, in a totally inappropriate home.
On the shelf in the tower room which was Nell’s bedroom and which she loved—with its six windows pacing around the walls, and the trees tumbling about in the wind outside, and the once pretty, now shabby, painted furniture which had been Milady’s when she was a child—was a cheap tin teddy bear on a pin. It was her treasure. It was magic. Nell knew it must come undone somehow, but she never tried to find out: on those rare occasions when she was upset or troubled, she would go upstairs and hold the tin bear in her small hand and shake it, and listen to it rattle, and feel better. Milady, seeing she loved it so much, presently gave Nell a silver chain so she could hang it around her neck.
There are certain key objects in this world, reader, mere things, which play a part in human lives, and this little jewel was one of them. It had been given to Clifford’s mother, as we know, by his grandmother. Generations of Nell’s family had looked at it and loved it. It should have been lost, or sold a hundred times, but somehow it had survived. Now Nell, instinctively, took comfort from it and waited for what would happen next.
BACK HOME
NELL HAD A LITTLE half-brother, Edward. When he was born he weighed seven pounds, five ounces, and Simon was there at the birth. He was a conscientious and modern father. He held Helen’s hand during her contractions, and it was an easy birth, as Nell’s had not been. The new baby yelled and shouted for all he was worth, and kicked visibly and lustily, and had a remarkable habit of peeing in a great soaking arch, drenching all his clean clothes whenever he was being changed. It made Helen laugh, and Simon was glad to see it, though Edward’s behavior seemed to him more an occasion for scowls than mirth. She had not laughed much lately; so quiet and sad the home had seemed without Nell. And yet, Simon thought, his own grief had been greater than Helen’s, his own mourning at her loss more intense—and Nell was not even his own child. It worried him. There was something wrong here; he was afraid his wife still clung to the belief the child had somehow survived the crash. A pity he had not feigned some kind of recognition in the identification hut—it would have been easy enough.
The great benefit of a funeral, complete with body (however incomplete the latter may be), is that it makes the mourners accept the fact of death. A memorial service—such as Nell had had in the local church one Sunday afternoon—was hardly the same. And now Simon came to think of it, Helen had not even attended that service. She had felt faint on the way to church, or said she had, and turned back. He had not attempted to dissuade her—she was heavily pregnant; the service could only be yet another upsetting experience for her. Now he wished he had insisted. He’d supposed she wanted to avoid Clifford, but as it happened he hadn’t even turned up. He was abroad, the Wexford grandparents said, with just a hint of apology. But at least they’d come along, as had John Lally and Helen’s mother, Evelyn. What a crew he’d taken on, Simon sometimes thought, when he’d taken on Helen! He came from solid suburban stock himself: his parents kindly and steady, if (he was sorry to say) not very bright. His own struggle out of his background had required not so much the slippery arts of diplomacy as perpetual explanation. If Helen was not frank with him, if she was evasive, if she seemed somehow to be pretending, he had only to look to her background to understand why.
Understand it he might, but still it pained him. He wanted all of Helen now, as he hadn’t when he married her. He wanted her whole heart, her whole attention. He did not want her clinging to the belief that Nell was alive. Nell belonged to the past, to a dead marriage. Sometimes, when she was playing with the baby, she’d whisper something in his ear, and smile. And the baby would smile in response, and Simon would fancy she murmured, “You have a sister, baby Edward, and one day she’s coming home to us.” Of course this was sheer paranoia; it must be. But why couldn’t she smile like that at him? The fact was, that in keeping Nell alive, Helen kept Clifford alive. She would not let Clifford go any more than she’d let Nell.
Some first marriages are like that, reader. However distressing they are while they last, however unpleasant the divorce that draws them to their untimely end, the marriage seems the true, the only one, and whatever comes after, however well-sanctioned by a marriage ceremony, by the attentions of friends and relatives, still feels fake and second-best, and not just second-best, but second-rate. So it was with the marriage between Helen and Clifford; why it was that Helen so often sighed in her sleep and smiled, and Simon watched her so closely; it was the same reason that Clifford did not remarry, while still blaming Helen in his heart for everything that went wrong, from Nell’s death to his own inability to love.
Little Edward knew nothing of all this, of course. He opened his eyes to the world each morning and knew it was good, and bawled and beamed, and made his mark on it the only way he knew—by drenching everything in sight. He found his parents’ marriage just fine.
THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD
READER, IN CASE YOU’RE wondering, on the day of Nell’s memorial service little Brigitte frightened everyone by complaining of a pain in her tummy and by being so pale they put her to bed and kept her there. Milady burned feathers over her and did incantations involving the blood of a lamb—which she kept by the liter in her new freezer—which seemed to make her better. And on the day of Edward’s birth Nell skipped about in her grand, dusty, eccentric house, and gave her nurse (aged eighty-one) an extra-special hug, knowing somehow it was an extra-special day.
“Qu’as tu? Qu’as tu?” asked Marthe, bewildered.
“Sais pas, sais pas,” sang Brigitte, but she did. The world was good.
Now if you’d told this to Arthur Hockney he’d have smiled indulgently and said impossible, how could Nell possibly know. But he’d be speaking with a forked tongue—he knew well enough that such things happened: that feelings carry, just as waves do. That people have auras—that you can tell a villain the moment he enters the room; that some few others come in like a breath of the freshest, most energizing air, and how pleased you always are to see them; that sometimes if you shuffle a pack of cards, you know what your hand will be, almost before it’s dealt. That expectations are somehow fulfilled, one way or another. That if you expect good, it happens. But that if you expect the ceiling to fall—it certainly will. And it was for these very reasons—his extra awareness, as it were, that he was so highly thought of in his profession, and
why Trans-Continental Brokers went on paying him and didn’t nag if from time to time he took time off, as he was doing now, on Helen’s behalf. Of course he’d rather be valued for what he did, than for what he was. Who wouldn’t?
JUST SUPPOSING
ARTHUR HOCKNEY STOOD UP to his ankles in water on the beach where the tail section of ZOE 05 had fallen. He had a tide timetable in his hand. He made for the shore road, and Lauzerk-sur-Manche, supposing that he had in his company a three-year-old child. He came to the village, inquired at the bank; there were vague memories of a man with a child who had changed Swiss francs to French francs, but no one was prepared to be exact about the date; possibly days before, possibly days after, the air disaster. The dramatic events of that day—the emergency vehicles, the TV crews, the newsmen—had put ordinary matters out of mind. He took the bus to Paris, but there it was the same thing—no one had any tale to tell of an English man and a little blonde English girl. He made inquiries at cafés and hotels around the bus terminal; and sent messages out through the criminal underworld, but no news came back. The trail, if trail there ever had been, was cold. He thought perhaps it was better for Nell to be dead than alive. He was well aware of the likely fate of stray children in the wrong company. White slavery still exists. All manners of evil exist in this world; they don’t go away because the papers forget them for a while. His client made only a distinction between dead and alive: and alive to her meant alive and well. He could not, would not, warn her otherwise.
Back in England, he made further inquiries into Blotton’s contacts and professional conduct. Mrs. Blotton shut the door in his face. But that was no indication of her complicity in a fraud, merely of her own sorry nature. The local police agreed to keep an eye on the household. Sooner or later, instinct told him, Erich Blotton would return from the dead to get his hands on his wife’s two million pounds. He suggested to ZARA Airlines that they reopen their files and delay, as far as they legally could, the actual transfer of the money. There would be delays in any case. Weren’t they busy enough in the courts, handling the ordinary claims of the relatives of the dead, and doing it in reverse alphabetical order, as was their quite understandable custom? It would be a long time before they got to Blotton, even were they trying.