The Hearts and Lives of Men

by Fay Weldon

  Clifford took Helen to the Festival Hall Restaurant, partly because he thought he’d meet nobody there he knew, and partly because, although not the most modish place in the world, the view is the best in all London. Neither Clifford nor Helen said much at first. Clifford thought she was astonishingly lovely, lovelier than he had remembered. There was something about the gentle, tender, almost submissive way she held her head—and yet he knew how stubborn, how almost vicious (in his terms) she could be. He knew that the air of purity, of steadfastness, was deceptive. She was faithless, sluttish, vapid! Wasn’t she? And, as for Helen, she knew that Clifford’s courtesy was skin deep; that his charm was a trick, a trap; that he sweet-talked her today only to devastate, hurt, destroy her tomorrow. And the image of Nell stood between them: the child they had loved, but not enough, because the love had been overwhelmed by misery, injured pride and hate. It was their rage, their disappointment with each other which had led to their losing her. How could they talk about any of this? And since they couldn’t say what was important, they had to make do with small talk. Even so, through their diffident talk of fashions and events—something else kept emerging: perhaps just the memory of the few stunning, perfect months they’d had together, years ago, which couldn’t be kept down. Clifford caught Helen’s hand as she reached for a glass and held it, and she let it be kept.

  “I want to talk about Nell,” he said.

  “I can’t believe she’s dead,” said Helen. “I won’t talk about her being dead. They never found her body.”

  “Oh, Helen,” he said, distressed for her, “if you want to believe that, by all means do. If it makes it better for you.”

  Such unexpected kindness brought tears to her eyes.

  “Simon won’t let me believe it,” she said.

  “He’s a journalist,” said Clifford, wisely not referring to him as the dwarf, “and it’s in the nature of journalists to like things cut and dried. You’re not happy with him.”

  “No,” said Helen, and was surprised she said it.

  “Then why are you still with him?”

  “Because of Edward. Because if I leave Simon something terrible will happen to Edward.”

  It was her superstition, her dread. He understood this, too.

  “No it won’t,” he said. “It was because of me Nell died, not because of you. And Simon will behave better than me. That’s in his nature too.”

  “That’s true,” she said, and managed a smile. She shook her head as if to free it from a muffling of hearing, a misting of sight.

  “Oh Lord,” she said, “you make me feel so alive! Life comes pouring in from all directions. What am I to do?”

  “Come home with me,” he said. And of course she did, forgetting all about Arthur, or if not quite forgetting, certainly not caring.

  THAT NIGHT FOR NELL

  THAT EVENING, AS CLIFFORD and Helen’s lives came together again with at least a promise of happiness, Nell’s world lurched into further disarray. As Helen picked at her salmon mousse, and Clifford at his lamb cutlets, a meeting was being held at the Eastlake Assessment Center to discuss the future of a small group of children, including Nell. Now little Nell had begun to recover from the shock of losing home and family yet once again, and from the terrible sights of death and destruction she had witnessed, and was doing quite nicely, thank you. She was beginning to speak normally, and in English, not French, although she still suffered from patchy amnesia.

  She shared a dormitory with five other little girls—Cindy, Karen, Rose, Becky and Joan. They had hard mattresses (healthy, and cheap) and not enough blankets, for what the houseparents saved out of the Center’s heating allowance could be diverted into their own pockets. Rose and Becky wet the bed and were smacked every morning and made to wash their sheets. Cindy stumbled over her words and sometimes said good-night when she meant good-morning and was stood in the wastepaper basket to shame her and make her more sensible. Karen and Joan were diagnosed as being out of control, though both only seven, which meant they were very naughty indeed, and would tear up the blankets and kick the doors, and punch you suddenly in the stomach for no reason at all. Nell was very careful to be good, to be quiet and to smile as much as possible. She liked Rose very much and they were good friends. She tried to work out sensible ways of Rose’s not wetting the bed; she would take Rose’s before-bed orange drink (the yellow, sweet artificial kind, not the concentrated juice, which was expensive) if no one was looking and drink it herself, and it worked. She understood, even at this early age, that no one was being deliberately unkind—they were just stupid, and liked to save money. She had, after all, a profound sense of her own worth; had not her mother and father fought over her, each one wishing to possess her; had not Otto and Cynthia bent over her crib and smiled; had not Milord and Milady de Troite seen her as the source of all happiness, and youth, and hope? These things were vaguely remembered, but assimilated into the depths of her being. Nell saw that she was misunderstood, and therefore devalued—not that she was worth nothing—and therefore survived. She bowed her head but her eyes remained bright and her complexion clear. She knew that she would not be here forever, and in the meantime, as was her custom, determined to make the best of her circumstances. She might cry herself to sleep at night—quietly, in case she was heard and slapped for ingratitude—but she woke in the morning cheerful and smiling, thinking of tables to be learned or spelling mastered, or Karen to be helped, and new games to play with Rose, and ways to avoid the censorious red-rimmed eye of Annabel Lee, houseparent.

  Now Annabel Lee, and Horace her husband, were both heavy smokers, and cigarette smoke always made Nell feel quite ill, so that, apart from everything else, she kept as far away from them as she could. We know that this reaction was because of her memories of Erich Blotton, but Nell is in no position to explain this, even if she understood it herself, and Mr. and Mrs. Lee, both gray-faced and coughing from tobacco, did not understand it either. They did not think their behavior deserved quite such a response.

  “She still shies away when I come near,” said Annabel at the Relocation Meeting. “I don’t think foster parents could cope. What we don’t want is for Ellen Root to be returned time and time again, when yet another placing fails.” Ellen Root! Yes, reader, this was the name by which little Eleanor Wexford is now known. Well, she had to be called something, this child out of nowhere. Remember how she was found, with her few stumbling words of English, standing in a daze on the edge of a Route Nationale, against a background of fire and mayhem? They called her Ellen, because the word she whispered over and over again, when they bent to hear, was “Helene” and those who listened thought that must be her name. In fact she was remembering and pronouncing her mother’s name, dimly remembered, the French way—although the French itself had been driven from her child’s brain by shock and fear. So “Ellen” she became, and the “Root” from “Route Nationale.” Geddit? Annabel Lee thought she’d been rather clever in choosing the name, and no doubt she had. Annabel was a secret drinker. No one knew it. Not her husband Horace, certainly not the Social Services Authority which employed the couple. How could they? Nevertheless, “Ellen Root” was not the most glamorous of names, and this was perhaps the end Annabel Lee desired. A plain, heavy, hardworking woman herself, she did not much care for spectacularly pretty, charming, light-limbed little girls. Just as well, perhaps, they did not very often turn up at Eastlake.

  There was an epidemic of head-lice which plagued the Center, of a particularly stubborn kind, and somehow or other Ellen Root’s head was always the one to be shaved, while other children’s hair could be satisfactorily combed and shampooed. Mind you, Ellen’s hair was so thick and curly—as well as shiny, fair and pretty—Annabel may, indeed, just possibly, have had exceptional trouble with it. We must give her the benefit of the doubt. To do so is part of practicing virtues, the better to acquire them.

  Someone on the Relocation Panel remarked that the child had been at the Assessment Center for an unusual
ly long time. Nearly a year. Surely it was time she was moved on to somewhere more like a home, even if she was not yet ready for fostering? The Center was a halfway house for children in trouble—either of their own making or the world’s—and not intended to be their permanent residence.

  “It’s fine by me,” said Horace. “But where are you going to move Ellen Root to? She’s E.S.N.” (Reader, these initials mean Educationally Subnormal. Backward, that is to say. A right little thicko. Our Nell!) “It’s written there large as life on her papers. The only place that will take her is Dunwoody, and that’s hardly suitable.” Dunwoody was a home for the mentally disabled and disturbed, and Nell, though her I.Q. tests kept showing her up as backward, was at least always quiet and cooperative.

  “I don’t know so much,” said Annabel. “Whenever I try to comb her hair she pulls away.” And so Nell did, for fear of having it shaved, but Annabel didn’t think of that, or chose not to. “And once our precious little Ellen bit Horace. Remember?” So Ellen had, waking once from sleep, shaken awake by Horace, when a fire alarm had sounded at 2 A.M. and the whole institution had to be evacuated. Memories had come flooding back; she was terrified; she struggled—yes indeed, she had been uncontrollable. She had bitten. Biting! An unforgivable sin in child-care circles. “She was upset,” said Horace.

  “She’s disturbed,” said Annabel, grimly. “She bit almost to the bone, like a wild animal.” It had been, of course, a false alarm: everyone’s peace had been disturbed. (Joan it was who had crept out of bed and broken the glass with the tempting little red hammer, which hung from a hook just at child’s eye level.) But fire is a real hazard in such homes—some of the children think nothing of arson—and the threat of it is always taken seriously. Even worse than biting!

  Now, reader, you may be wondering why Nell, or Ellen, came off so badly in intelligence tests. It was for a very simple reason. Asked questions such as “Does the sun shine at night?” Ellen would reply “Yes”—thinking of the way the sun rises on the other side of the world even as it sinks on this side—whereas the real answer—as ordinarily given by under-fives—is “No.” (And Nell was being given tests for four-year-olds, inasmuch as her linguistic ability was at that level, because of her two-and-a-half years of speaking no English at all.) These things happen. Children in care are assessed wrongly, by accident, stupidity or just occasionally by virtue of adult malice, and end up very much in the wrong place.

  And so it was decided that night that Nell should stay a little longer at Eastlake, and not be fostered. “Some evidence of mental disturbance,” was entered on her form, adding to the doom of “E.S.N.” and another obstacle placed in the path of Ellen’s future well-being within our child-care system.

  At that same meeting a motion of gratitude was proposed and passed in relation to a certain Mrs. Erich Blotton, who had presented the home with yet another large sum, this time £750. Mrs. Blotton never appeared in person, but was understood to give generously to many children’s homes in the area. She was assumed to be some kind of nutter, which didn’t make her gifts any the less welcome. It was also voted that a letter be sent inviting Mrs. Blotton to visit Eastlake.

  You have heard my views on coincidence, reader. I assure you, this is the kind of thing that happens. Mrs. Blotton, infertile, married Erich Blotton, who wanted children more than anything. If how, having the insurance money from the crash of ZOE 05, she gives it away to children’s homes, is that surprising? The world is not an enormous place—no, it is very small: circles within circles, wheels within wheels—look at Angie and Dorothy crossing paths, all unknowing, at Harrods! Just about everyone, so far as I can see, ends up encountering everyone else, the bit-part players in the story of their lives.

  TOGETHER AGAIN

  IT IS PERHAPS JUST as well that Clifford and Helen knew nothing of this. They are holding hands across a table and looking into each other’s eyes. Sometimes it seems that we can have our happiness only at someone else’s expense. While we celebrate our emotions here, someone suffers there, from our neglect.

  “I have been faithful to you,” Clifford observes, which is extraordinary, under the circumstances.

  “Trudi Barefoot?” Helen can’t help asking. Wouldn’t you?

  “Who?” He’s joking. Trudi has a new film out. Her name is plastered all over the Western world.

  “Elise O’Malley?”

  “Ah begorah, where’s my pills?” He’s shocking! Merciless! And Elise so dependent and trusting!

  “Serena Bailey, Sonia Manzi, Gertie Lindhoff, Bente Respigi, Candace Snow—” She knows a lot of their names, though not quite all.

  “You can’t believe what you read in the papers,” he says, “at least I hope you can’t. Or what about the dwarf and Janice Best?”

  There now! He’s forgotten and referred to Simon as “the dwarf.” Helen takes away her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “You know I’m just jealous.”

  That’s better! Helen smiles. Three years now since Nell was lost. She’s allowed to smile. And Clifford will allow her to cling to her illusion, if illusion it be, that Nell still lives, and she once again inhabits a world where all things are possible, even happiness.

  Reader, after dinner (which cost only some £15, the year being what it is, and Clifford never one to spend extravagantly), Clifford and Helen went back to his house in Orme Square and spent the night together. The cost of that one evening, for the three couples out dining, if it were to include Angie’s new gold-leafed shoes, certainly came to over £750, the amount Mrs. Blotton was donating to the Eastlake Assessment Center. Nell’s supper of fish fingers and baked beans, followed by jam tart, costing out at 6d. If there is any such thing as actual immorality, I think it lies herein, that the haves in this world have so much, and the have-nots so little.

  Arthur Hockney, left to baby-sit all night without even the courtesy of a phone call, was paid nothing for his pains. Poor Arthur! If you leave out the night his parents were killed and the day he told his mentors he was betraying them, would not after all join the Civil Rights movement, these were the most painful few hours of his life. He didn’t need to be psychic to know what was happening. Who would?

  Reader, if you are married, do your best to stay married. If you are unmarried, the cynical might say, take care only to fall in love with someone you dislike, for you may very well end up divorced, and the worst thing about divorcing, being divorced, is how you have to practice hate, have to learn to loathe and despise the one you used to love and admire, so as to persuade yourself that nothing much has been lost. Wanker! Wally! Him? Her? Good riddance to bad rubbish! The practice of hate is very bad for the character—and terrible for the children! But if you could only start out from a point of dislike, the effort and distress involved would surely be far less. At least you wouldn’t have to change your view of the whole universe, and all the people in it. Black could stay black, and white white.

  Clifford and Helen, reunited once again that night, in the pretty little Georgian house in Orme Square, laughing, talking and happy, could hardly remember why they had hated each other so much. She could see his infidelities as mere manliness; his meanness as prudence; his absorption in his work as only reasonable; herself as having married too young and not giving Clifford what he needed.

  “I was only ever trying to make you jealous!” she said to him, standing lithe and lovely in the marble shower, in a cloud of steam which, like a gauze over a film camera, made her seem to Clifford mistier and more romantic than she had even appeared in his dreams—the good ones, not the bad. And he had, to be frank, dreamed of Helen a good deal, even in the company of Elise, Serena, Sonia, Gertie, Bente, Candace—and whoever.

  Clifford for his part could now see Helen’s early infidelity as a symptom, not a cause, of the collapse of their marriage. His neglect of her, his selfishness, was to blame.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “so sorry! I regretted it so much, at once!

  “You did noth
ing that I hadn’t done,” he said, and saw her eyes grow cold with jealousy, but only for a moment.

  “I don’t want to hear,” she said. “I want to forget.”

  “I behaved atrociously over Nell,” he said. “Poor Nell.”

  “Lovely Nell,” she said. And there, they could talk about Nell, easily now, and incorporate her in their mutual pasts. Apologies are important things. World Wars start because they are not made, because no one is prepared to say you were right, I was wrong.

  So there they were, six years later, hand in hand, so much time and life wasted! And Simon Cornbrook, hand on heart, returning from Japan at five in the morning to repair his marriage, found Helen not in her marital bed, and Arthur the detective asleep on the couch, and little Edward asleep upstairs, coughing away, with a nasty croak in the cough which might at any moment turn into a really nasty attack of croup.

  RUNNING AWAY

  AND WHAT OF LITTLE Nell, whom this irresponsible pair had tossed to the winds of fate? Oh yes, they were certainly irresponsible—they married each other and should have made at least some effort to put up with each other, once they had Nell. (What married people without children do with their lives is hardly of consequence. They can fly to different ends of the earth for all I care; they only harm each other and themselves and will soon cure.) Well, the night Clifford and Helen were reunited was the night that Nell, or Ellen Root as she now was, ran away from the Eastlake Center, away from stupid Horace and his punitive, drunken wife Annabel. Or at any rate that was how Nell saw them; not, I daresay, how they really were. Nell, in her short life, though accustomed to sudden, horrible events, had until now been cared for—apart from one day with Erich Blotton—by the most kindly, most sensitive, most responsive of folk, in the prettiest if sometimes rather eccentric surroundings. The Center, with its smell of cabbage, disinfectant and human despair mixed, and its brisk, tough, powerful staff, astonished rather than defeated her. Less traumatic than the aircrash, than when the devil had razed the château to the ground, than the calamity on the Route Nationale, even more amazing. And not pleasant! To stand in the bleakness of the Eastlake medical room, and have her head shaved! To see her pretty curls litter the worn gray linoleum floor! To have no one to embrace, no one to tell her stories, no one to sing to her—well, these she could put up with, for a time. But to be unable to love and be loved—if this went on it would be misfortune indeed—the worst of all the misfortunes, in fact, that could befall a small child, and Nell knew, instinctively, that she must leave, and soon. That anywhere was better than here! That there were good things and kind people in the world and that she must be off to find them.