by Fay Weldon
It was Ellen Root’s seventh birthday—according to the East-lake Center. We know of course that in fact Nell was only six and a half. But seven is the magic age when children are supposed to be legally lit to go to school themselves—to traverse major trunk roads, to avoid the strangers who lie in wait—and Nell listened to Annabel telling her so and thought, if I am old enough to cross roads on my own, I am old enough to leave here, and never, never come back. That day, moreover, she had been sent to school for the first time in her life. So far she had attended the Infants’ Class at the Center, for children with Special Needs—that is to say whenever Annabel Lee saw fit to call it together, and could be bothered to organize the Water Play, or find the Sandbox. That she had found boring, but this she hated. A great, wild, clanging, clattering place, full of shrieks and yells and pinches and insults! And there was a tall gray woman there who kept teaching her to read, and wouldn’t believe her when she said she already could, and wouldn’t even hear her read, so Nell had stayed mute, and the woman had slapped her. No, Nell had to go!
When she came back from the terrible place called school (the others had proper homes to go to, and she had only the Eastlake Center, which they all knew, so they wouldn’t talk to her) Nell took a serviceable laundered pillowcase from the laundry room, and wrapped her few possessions in it. Sponge-bag, a thin towel, a pair of shoes already too small, a jersey, a yellow-haired rag doll given to her out of the funds so kindly donated by Mrs. Blotton, and the one item left of all her past—the tin teddy bear on a silver chain—which to retain she had smiled and charmed many a time. She went to bed in the dormitory as usual but kept herself awake—which was almost the most difficult part of the whole enterprise—and when she heard the hall clock strike nine, crept out of her bed, stole down the stairs, unlocked the heavy front door, and was out into the brilliant, starry night, into the big wild busy world, to seek her fortune.
HOT PURSUIT!
“RUN AWAY!” EXCLAIMED ANNABEL Lee, when told by her husband Horace that little Ellen Root’s bed was empty, and the child was nowhere to be found. “The wicked, wicked child!” And she shoved her empty sherry bottle under the bed so her husband wouldn’t see it. It was a double marital bed but Horace slept mostly on a camp-bed in the attic, where he had his train set. It was an elaborate and wonderful system, electronically controlled, and the children might have appreciated it, if they had only been allowed up to see it. Which of course they weren’t.
Now “running away” is, next to arson, next to biting, the worst thing a child in an institution can do. The child who flees is seen as being monstrously, unthinkably ungrateful. Any institution, to those who run it, is a fine, kind and excellent place. If the child (or the prisoner, or the patient) cannot agree and acts accordingly, it is not only willful and wicked, but puts everyone to terrible and unnecessary trouble. The treatment is to pursue the runaways with great energy, haul them back, and then punish them severely for running, as if this will somehow finally endear the place to the ingrate, so they won’t do it again.
“That’ll learn you!” cries the grown-up world. Thwack, thwack! “That’ll learn you to like it! That’ll learn you to love us! That’ll learn you to be grateful!”
Annabel Lee set the dogs after little Ellen Root. Yes, really. She had no business doing it; certainly no authority would ever have consented to such an act; but remember Annabel Lee had drunk two-thirds of a bottle of sherry, while waiting for her husband Horace to finish playing trains and, perhaps, come to bed. (Quite a proportion of the money Mrs. Blotton had donated to Eastlake over the years had been spent on the train set, and no one who saw it—though that was almost no one—could deny it was wondrous. So delicate and intricate, with its tunnels and signals and trees and little wayside cottages complete with curtains and electric lights, and some really rare collector’s items by way of engines—including the fabulous Santa Fe—and the invoices just said “toys,” so who was there to query the expenditure? No one.)
“The dogs! The dogs! Unloose the dogs!” cried Annabel Lee, clambering out of bed, a heavy, incongruous figure in her fine silk nightie (which Horace took no notice of at all, but she never stopped trying). “We can’t call the police, there’ll only be a scandal! No end of a fuss, and her with nits in her hair, to bring us all into disgrace. What the little miss wants is a proper fright! We’ll give it to her, well and truly.”
As if, reader, poor little Nell hadn’t had a good deal too many frights in her life already.
Annabel Lee kept her two big, black, sleek dogs with their big jaws and sharp white teeth, in kennels, just around the side of the house, outside the dining-room, so the children could see them whenever they came down to a meal. The dogs calmed the children, said Annabel Lee. They certainly subdued them, especially since Kettle and Kim were kept hungry, and on the end of rattling chains just long enough to let the animals press their dripping jaws against the window, squashing their gums, magnifying their teeth.
“If you don’t stop doing that” (running in the corridor, forgetting to clean your comb, losing your socks or whatever), “I’ll feed you to the dogs!” Discipline at Eastlake was no problem at all.
When visitors or inspectors came, the dogs were moved to a compound at the very end of the long garden, and rabbits put in the kennels instead.
“How nice of the children to have pets!” said the visitor. “As well as so many toys! But where are all the toys? Broken, you say? Good Lord! But they’re disturbed, aren’t they, poor little things. How lucky they are to have you, Mrs. Lee; so warm and friendly and kind. What patience you must have. You put us all to shame!” They said it so often Annabel Lee herself quite believed it.
Most people, of course, believe that they’re good. Have you ever, reader, met anyone who thought they were wicked? But someone, somewhere, must be, or the world wouldn’t be in the state that it’s in, and on the very night that her parents were reunited—though to Arthur Hockney’s and Simon Cornbrook’s sorrow—our dear Nell wouldn’t be running over a warm, summery, moonlit stretch of Hackney Marshes, pursued by a couple of slavering, savage black dogs, and behind them, at the wheel of the Eastlake van, lights blazing, horn blaring, a drunken, equally slavering Annabel Lee.
Reader, I don’t want to insult Dobermans. Properly raised and kindly treated, they are the most elegant, responsive, gentle of creatures. It’s only when reared by someone like Annabel Lee that they become monsters. And if they had caught up with Nell, I really do believe they would quite probably have torn her to bits, out of the ferocity of their despair. They wanted to be civilized, but had been rendered savage, and hated it.
Annabel’s husband Horace, watching the departing trio—the leaping dogs, his shrieking wife—wondered briefly whether to call the police and put paid to Annabel’s activities once and for all, but decided against it, and went back up to the attic room to see whether the newly acquired and favorite but rather ancient Santa Fe engine could race the Royal Scot up a one-in-three gradient. I think myself Horace was slightly mad. Perhaps he should be pitied for it, but I can’t manage it.
Nell ran: how she ran. She ran across smooth ground and rough; she ran over tussock and stream; she ran toward the roadway, to the noise and the roar and what she thought must be safety. And it is a terrifying thing for any normal person to watch a small child pelt toward such a place, but Annabel Lee was not impressed, any more than she cared if a cockroach (there were many at Eastlake) toppled off the top of the cooker into a pan of boiling potato water—she was like that. If the child was run over it was her own fault; she, Annabel Lee, had done everything to stop her; no one (except Horace who would never tell) would ever understand what had happened. Perhaps Ellen Root should have been killed in that other accident on the Route Nationale; perhaps all she had, after all, was a kind of leftover life: the roads, those ogres of modern life, would claim her for their own and she, Annabel, would do what she could to help. Annabel Lee, reader, was certainly more than a little mad, and very b
ad, and hated Nell unreasonably and perversely perhaps simply because the child was, unlike herself, sane, and good. She was not at the moment very pretty, of course—Annabel had seen to that. Her head had been shaved a couple of weeks back, and her hair now stood up in a short blonde bristle, in which it seemed to Annabel that nits still sheltered, so obsessive about and antagonistic toward the child was she—and Eastlake was beginning to make her little face pinched and her eyes screw up. She was getting out just in time!
So plain little shaven Nell ran toward the roadway, and death or life, how could she know which? And when she got to the very brink and tripped and tumbled down the embankment and onto the very road itself, Annabel Lee just called her dogs off, and sat in her Land-Rover for a while, and laughed, and then turned the wheel for home.
Now little Nell was lucky, a quality she had inherited from her father. That is to say, apart from the monstrous underlying bad fortune of being a child gone altogether astray in the world, strokes of excellent good luck would come her way—the kind of luck a spider has when it’s fallen into a bath and some kind person comes along and, instead of turning on the hot tap and washing it down the drain, politely goes to the trouble of offering it a piece of string, so it can clamber out. Whatever fairy godmother it was who looked after Nell returned to her post (better late than never, I suppose—but really, such negligence!) and offered the poor child a piece of string in the form of a van parked on a police turnout just where she clambered over the embankment and rolled down, down toward the tarmac. The van had a lowered ramp at the back, its headlights were off, the driver Clive and his mate Beano were in the act of switching the license plates by flashlight.
Even as they did so, a second car pulled up, and Clive and Beano helped its driver swiftly and silently shift a massive piece of furniture from its roof rack up the ramp into the van. Then the car backed again onto the dark roadway, and was off.
Nell crouched and watched, regaining her breath. Here obviously lay safety and escape. The minute Clive’s and Beano’s backs were turned—she ran up the ramp and into the back of the van; the dogs would not follow her there. Clive and Beano finished their task, the ramp was lifted, Nell not noticed, the door slammed shut, and Nell and a fraction of the proceeds of one of the greatest antiques robberies of all time—the pillaging of one of our finest country homes, Montdragon House—were on their way west. And Clive and Beano—a merry pair, though villainous—laughed at the way they’d used the police turnout to beat the officers at their own game, and Nell heard the laughter and felt she was amongst friends again. There had not been much laughter at the Eastlake Assessment Center.
Nell fell asleep and nothing woke her, not rattling, nor bumping, nor voices, nor movement, till suddenly the morning sun streamed in as the van doors were opened, and she was at Faraway Farm, on the edge of deepest, prettiest, greenest Wales, where she was to spend the next six and a half years.
ALL CHANGE!
“I’M REMARRYING HELEN,” Clifford said to Angie Wellbrook, at breakfast at Claridges, fresh from his night with Helen, feeling clean again, and strong, and that the world was his oyster. “And what is all this nonsense about shares? If Leonardo’s closes in Geneva, or stops doing exhibitions, I shall simply resign, and then where would your fun be? Just sit back, Angie, and enjoy the profits. Don’t interfere!” And Angie said, weeping from the shock of it, spoiling her expensive makeup, dropping tears upon crêpe de chine that just couldn’t stand water and never recovered, “Come to bed just this once, Clifford. Just an hour with me, and I promise to go away and leave you and Leonardo’s in peace.” And I’m afraid to say that Clifford did, though more out of pity, mixed of course with self-interest (how could it not be?) than anything else, on one of Claridges’ old-fashioned bouncy brass beds, in the morning, which seems very decadent and disgraceful to me. Then he went around to his lawyers, to see how speedily Helen could divorce the dwarf, that is to say the talented and suffering Simon.
“I’m sorry, Simon,” Helen said to her husband, Simon Cornbrook. “But our marriage just hasn’t been working at all, has it! And you have Janice Best to go to, after all.”
But of course Simon didn’t want Janice Best. All he had managed to do, in his attempts to make Helen jealous, was put himself morally and legally in the wrong. Well, it happens all the time. The husband, the wife, confesses to an affair in the hope of making the spouse sit up and take notice; realizes just how much she, he, is in danger of losing if she, he, goes on like this; and all that transpires is that the spouse bounces off with someone altogether else, with a clear conscience and most of the money. Never confess, reader, never be found out, not if you value your marriage. Or you’ll end up with nothing—no marriage, no lover (he, she, only fancies you when you were unobtainably someone else’s), a guilty conscience and like as not no alimony. You may even lose the children. It happens.
Helen was kind and said of course Simon could continue to see little Edward; really it would make very little difference, would it? Simon was so often away, he might even see the child more, this way. The house in Orme Square was very towny, she knew, but there was lots of room for a nanny (Nanny! She who had sworn always to look after Edward herself. How could she!) and Clifford would love Edward for her sake, and would probably be a more attentive father than Simon had ever been, and he’d known when he married her she’d only ever really loved Clifford—Simon mustn’t think she regretted any of it, she did hope they would be friends—and he could sell the Muswell Hill house and move in somewhere with Janice Best. They were really suited—Simon and Janice—in the same line of business, after all, and somehow spiritually married: filling column inches together the way others filled marital beds.
“Edward had croup,” was all Simon could say. It was somehow the only protest he felt entitled to make. “Edward had croup and you left him alone with a black detective as a baby-sitter.
“Is that a racist statement?” Her pretty eyebrows went up.
“Don’t be so bloody stupid.” Simon was almost weeping. “All I mean is a black detective doesn’t know how to deal with croup.”
“Why not? Because he’s black? I’m sure he knows a great deal more about how to deal with a sick child than Janice does.” In which she was quite right. But then no one could know less. “In any case, it isn’t proper croup, just a nasty chesty cough. This has always been a damp house. The trees needed cutting but you never would.”
Janice wanted to marry Simon. It is useful to a woman to be married, especially to someone a little higher up in a profession than she—so long as, that is, it is not what you and I would call a domestic marriage, in which the wife is expected to stay home and keep house. That was certainly not the kind of marriage Janice had in mind. She saw it more as a working partnership. A quick comparison of notes over the breakfast orange juice—the name of a useful contact, advice on the nature of a particular editor—a sharp tool with which to make footholds for advancement up the professional tree. In its own way, I suppose, rather like the Angie/Sylvester relationship, but with mutual legal obligations and bed thrown in. And of course she wouldn’t mind Simon’s seeing Edward—she had no intention of having children herself; he could hardly want to go through all that boredom again, all that being tied down—a journalist had to be free to follow stories to the end of the earth if need be—surely! No, he should certainly sell the Muswell Hill house, and invest the money—giving as little as possible to that boring bitch Helen (Simon, how can it be your fault she’s gone off with Clifford Wexford? What are you talking about? They deserve each other. For God’s sake!)—and then use the income to rent some service apartment in Central London, preferably furnished. They wouldn’t be spending much time in it, after all. Yes, Simon, I do want us to get married. It is important. It does make a difference. After all that stuff in the paper. All that sake-throwing. Now you’re free to marry, don’t you see how humiliating it will be for me if you don’t?
Oh Miss Best! The new Mrs. Cornbrook. Jani
ce Cornbrook. Yes, with that name you can work pretty well on the quality dailies. As Best—well, you could hardly look higher than the Mail on Sunday. Which in its own way is pretty high, of course, in a professional sense—or Simon wouldn’t have taken up with her—but Janice was aiming higher still. The Independent, or its like.
Poor Simon. His eyesight suddenly deteriorated, so he had to have his glasses changed; he developed a jaw abscess and had to have teeth removed; his hair receded a whole inch—all in that year between his return from Tokyo and his marriage to Janice, by way of the loss of his wife and child. At the registry-office wedding (everyone who was anyone in the Fleet Street World came, crowding unasked and drunken into a room too small for them, flashing cameras and quite upsetting the registrar) Janice caught a glimpse of Simon under a harsh, unflattering light and realized he was old and what would she do if he suddenly lost energy, packed up on her physically, but it was too late then. Serve her right, say I.