by Fay Weldon
“PR,” he said. He hadn’t told Helen that Angie was over. He didn’t want her upset. He wished Angie would just go away. He certainly didn’t want to be lured into a Claridges bed with her. She was looking particularly sunbaked and lean.
“Terrible scrawls,” said Angie. “The thing about child art is that it isn’t quaint, as parents like to think. It’s just plain bad.”
They stopped by one painting, prettily done, which Clifford thought had a kind of ethereal quality. It had won first prize in the Under-Tens. It was the painting of two rather vaguely portrayed people, encased in a kind of conch shell or was it an aircraft tail, or a sort of heavenly descending elevator, being lowered on ropes of doves, at the hands of angels, who leaned out of fluffy clouds and gazed benignly down on a gentle sea.
“How very peculiar,” said Angie. “Whoever did that should see someone.”
“I think it’s enchanting,” said Clifford, and looked to see the name of the artist. It was by a certain Nell Beachey (9). He remembered his own Nell and moistened his lips. Grief sometimes still took him unawares, but these days made him sad, not angry. How old would Nell be now?
“Rather Lally-like,” he said, “in its way. Except it’s not cross, but happy.”
“I can’t think what you’re talking about,” said Angie. “I still have this suite at Claridges. Shall we go and share a bottle of champagne and celebrate the twins?”
I am sorry to say that Clifford did, though crossing his fingers in his mind, the better to pretend it hadn’t happened. But it had. It did. Angie flew off, victorious. Helen knew nothing about it. Clifford didn’t tell. What harm was done? Oh, reader, in the scheme of things, the great balance in which good deeds are weighed against bad, even if no observable harm was done, let us just say it simply didn’t help. Now did it!
PEACE AND QUIET
READER, PICTURE A TRANQUIL valley in the Welsh border country, in the year 1977. Picture gentle hills, rushing streams, the winding A49 and, a mile or so from it, the small village of Ruellyn, about which nothing is unusual except the church with the Saxon tower the occasional tourist comes to see. Envisage Faraway Farm, on Ruellyn’s outskirts, secluded, charming and dilapidated, and leaving on the school bus in the morning, and returning in the evening, a neat, pretty, bright, twelve-year-old schoolgirl, in her first year at the Comprehensive. And this of course is none other than Nell Wexford, and I am sure you will be glad to know that she has had at least a few years of peace and quiet, albeit amongst criminals. As indeed have her natural father and mother, Clifford and Helen—though only John Lally and a handful of others would describe the world the latter moved in as “criminal.” That is to say, the Art World. Ten years later, now when the past is plundered by the present and the vision of the artist is devalued by the greed of those who know only too well how to exploit it, the word does not perhaps sound quite so inappropriate, so paranoiac, as it did then.
Reader, back to the subject of peace, quiet, and the child. It is my ambition to see the word “punishment” removed forthwith from the English language. I never knew anyone, child or adult, who was “punished” and was better for the experience. Punishment is inflicted by the powerful upon the powerless. It breeds defiance, sulking, fear and hatred, but never remorse, reform or self-understanding. It makes matters worse, not better. It adds to the sum total of human misery; it cannot possibly subtract from it. By all means, slap the child who puts his fingers in the electric socket, or runs across the road without looking—how can you help it? Besides, it is a reaction more than a genuine punishment, and the child forgives it instantly—but if you wish to make a child behave, remember that the frown and groan of a mother who usually smiles is most feared by the child than the wallop and shriek of a mother who always slaps anyway.
I say this because it was to the great credit of those two criminals Clive and Polly that they never punished Nell and were always proud of her and I do believe this is why, in spite of everything, she survived so well in their care. The world reckoned them bad, really bad, but in the scale of human wickedness and cruelty, the receiving, hiding and selling of stolen property isn’t to my mind all that frightful. And Clive and Polly were so inefficient at their business that they would leave French-polished tables out in the rain, and stand softwood chairs in damp hay so the legs rotted, and leave tapestries in full sunlight so they faded, and quite often forgot to ask for money, and didn’t count it when they did receive it—and once you get a reputation for that, watch out! Nell did what she could. Even as quite a small child she had a natural eye for a “good piece”; she didn’t like to see beautiful things going to rack and ruin.
“Clive,” she’d say, “shall we just move the table inside? Look, the top’s going all bubbly in the sun. I’ll help. I’ll take this end, you take that.”
“Later, darling,” he’d say, idly, and probably add, “Whatever did we do without you, Nell?” with total sincerity, but somehow all he did was just take another drag on his herbal cigarette (or that’s how he explained the funny smell to Nell) and it never got done, and when Beano and Rady came to collect the table it was all froth, bubble and rot rather than good hard honed salable-if-stolen wood, and there’d be trouble.
I am not forgiving them their criminality, reader, don’t misunderstand me. I’m just saying Clive and Polly did well by little Nell in some ways, not others, and will have their reward, as we shall see, on this earth.
“Hippies!” said the villagers of the strange, vague, longhaired folk of Faraway Farm, with their irrational comings and goings, and night visitors, and the sacks full of baked-bean cans and empty wine bottles left out for the weekly dustcart to take away. The refuse team-leader was the uncle of the postmistress, who was the cousin of Miss Barton at the village store, and the people of Ruellyn were not daft, and knew well enough what was going on. But the tenants at Faraway Farm were helpful neighbors and would turn out to look for a lost cow, and let their spare land for grazing, and Polly played the piano at the weekly disco, so they said nothing. And besides, there was Nell. No one wanted to upset Nell by calling the police, or anything drastic like that. They were proud of their Nell, who had won the Under-Tens Weetabix painting competition in 1974 and, though she’d never quite made it to the top again, had had many runner-up and honorable-mentions since.
Miss Barton at the shop held onto the entry forms for Nell, or got them from her librarian sister in Cardiff.
“Nell,” she’d say, “how about best essay on the Commonwealth, Under-Fifteens?” or “Young Journalist of the Year is coming up again!” or “What about the Save Our Planet painting competition, Under-Sixteens, Nell?”—hardly seeming to notice that Nell was only twelve, and off Nell would go to do her best. She learned the lesson young that other people’s high expectations of you are not only a pleasure, but a burden as well. It is not enough to succeed; you have to go on succeeding. So Nell would stay late at school, with the reference books around, working away; or be up early at Faraway Farm, with a blanket wrapped around her and her hands almost too cold to hold the brush, painting, drawing, sewing. Oil-fired central heating had been installed at the farm before Clive and Polly rented the place, but if they could remember to order the oil they couldn’t afford to pay for it, and vice versa, so the winters were very, very cold.
The view of the village was that Nell had really quite a hard time of it. She did after-school and Saturday jobs from the beginning. Even as a seven-year-old she could tell a plant from a weed, and would thin out carrots, with her little dexterous fingers, better and more quickly than many an adult. She would run errands and take parcels to the daily bus and pick gooseberries—a thorny job—without pulling the branches, and in general be sensible and not complain. Later, of course, she babysat and child-walked, and the little ones loved her and were good as gold in her care. But it was noticeable that the next day Nell would be up at Miss Barton’s spending the money not on crisps and sweets and Sindy Dolls but on things like bread, cheese, eggs, or
anges or Ajax, which she’d then lug up the hill to Faraway Farm. Once a month or so Polly would appear in the shop, all long skirts and smiles, with wads and wads of fivers and practically buy up the shelves, but it was little Nell who had to remind her about things like Brillo, furniture polish and dishwashing liquid. The village reckoned it was Nell, and not her mother, who kept Faraway Farm in order, and they were right. Another lesson Nell learned young was that if your environment is not as you’d like it, you’d better not sit about moaning and complaining, but do what you can to improve it.
But as for her not bringing friends home, well, that did remain a problem. Forget that some families are like that: some mothers just can’t stand the tramp, noise and mess of other people’s children, can they, seeing their own as bad enough? But somehow Polly didn’t fit into this category, with her generous bosom and laddered tights. It was odd.
“Can I come over to your house?” Nell’s best friend Brenda Kildare would keep asking.
“You wouldn’t like it,” Nell would say.
“Why wouldn’t I like it?”
And Nell would um and ah until one day she found a solution and said, “It’s haunted,” and that quieted everybody down.
It just might have been true.
Now Nell, at the age of twelve, knew well enough that Clive and Polly were not her true parents. On the other hand, she could see that they loved her, within the limits of their own natures. That is to say, the more Nell was prepared to do in the way of organizing, cleaning, earning, housekeeping, even liaising with their robber friends, the more grateful and dependent they became.
“Nell, you’re a wonder,” they’d say, as she set some delicate dish of, say, cumin-spiced pork and noodles in front of them. “Now how about a proper Indian kedgeree for breakfast?” Nell read the cookery columns—perforce the daily cooking-on-a-budget ones, though how she dreamed over the Sunday recipes, all lobster, quails’ eggs, cream and brandy! (She had inherited, I fear, her father’s taste for luxury.) But she was prudent; she never overspent.
“Only one twenty-five the whole meal,” Nell would say proudly. And then, perhaps, casually, “Are Rady and Beano expected down tonight?”
“Maybe.” Polly and Clive tried, in a halfhearted way, to keep their criminal enterprises out of Nell’s way. To their credit, they wanted her to grow up “straight.”
“Because there’s a speed trap on the A49 today. They’re ever so active at the moment. Perhaps we ought to tell Beano and Rady. They wouldn’t want to be stopped for speeding, would they?”
“I’ll give them a call later,” Clive would say, and take another puff on his “herbal” cigarette and forget all about it, so it would be Nell who’d call up Rady and Beano.
“Go really slowly if you’re coming down,” she’d say. “Police traps on the A49; you know, that bit where it says forty and everyone goes seventy?”
“Thanks, Nell,” they’d say, blessing the day the fugitive six-year-old child had crept into the back of their van and been swept down the roadway to Faraway Farm. Police speed-traps uncover all kinds of things besides motorists with a penchant for speed, so think kindly of them, reader, next time they get you.
WORKING OUT THE PAST
NELL, TOO, BLESSED THE day she had arrived at Faraway Farm; when, crop-headed, cold and frightened, she had emerged from the back of the furniture van into the beauty of the rural wilderness, and had passed into Polly’s haphazard if generous care. She no longer bothered to wonder whose child she really was. At eight she’d decided (as little girls will at that age, even if they have birth certificates to prove otherwise) that she was in all likelihood royalty, or some kind of lost princess. By nine she’d decided that was unlikely. By ten she’d come to the conclusion that whoever her parents were, they were certainly not Clive and Polly. Her real parents, she was convinced, wouldn’t live in a smoky cloud of indecision, muddle, unemptied ashtrays, half-empty wine glasses, unfed hens the fox kept getting, unrealized promises and lost opportunities. (Nell, rest assured, very quickly took over the keeping of the poultry, and many an excellent egg breakfast resulted, and sponge cake for tea, made as the best sponges are, with a single giant goose egg, flour, sugar and no fat at all.)
So all Nell had from her past was a memory or two, and the tin teddy bear on a silver chain, which she had long ago unscrewed to discover her mother’s emerald pendant. Nell had quietly and silently replaced it, and hidden it in a safe place at the back of her cupboard, where the plaster was holed and crumbly, and where no one was likely to put a casual hand.
For some reason the little green jewel made her want to cry; it brought with it vague memories of silk dresses and a soft voice and smiles, but what was she to make of those? A guilty feeling went along with this particular resonance from the past—a suspicion that she had no business with the emerald in the first place. (Reader, you will remember that Nell, aged three, took it without permission to “show” at her nursery school, on the day that her adventures started, and you will be glad to know that, in spite of her close acquaintance with Clive and Polly, she is still capable of feeling guilt and remorse—that she is, in fact, in no danger of being criminalized!)
When she was twelve, Nell would lie awake at night, watching the branch of the ash tree rub against the window (it ought to have been pruned long ago, of course) in the light of the porch lamp which no one ever remembered to turn off, and listening to the noise of revelry below. Then she would try to make sense of remembered incidents. Now she had a vision of a storm, and a fire, and a terrible wrenching and crashing of metal—and wasn’t she nervous about fire and far more cautious than her friends when it came to crossing the A49? And another memory, a kind of very disagreeable close-up, of a dog with a slavering mouth, baring hideous teeth, and she didn’t like dogs—and then she’d fall asleep, conscious that all that was in the past, that the present was okay; the sense of being protected, of being enfolded with goodwill, still with her.
But, reader, the law of the land is the law of the land and Faraway Farm cannot continue forever thus, poised between good and evil; and neither can Nell live as if her past did not exist—presently it will rise up and affect the present. Clive and Polly will have to face the consequences of what I suppose we can describe only as moral sloppiness and Nell will have to move on. As we and Arthur Hockney know, it is in her fate, her nature, her destiny.
TWO INTERCONNECTIONS
ACTUALLY, DURING HER STAY at Faraway Farm, Nell’s past was closer than she dreamed. Once when she was eleven, Clifford’s parents Otto and Cynthia had visited Ruellyn Church, and Nell had passed them in the street, and caught Cynthia’s attention.
“What a pretty child,” said Cynthia to Otto.
“Nell would be about that age,” said Otto, and sighed, surprising Cynthia. They seldom spoke now about their lost granddaughter, for Clifford and Helen had the twins, Marcus and Max, Max ten minutes the younger. The present was so full it had somehow unknitted the past. Nell had looked with interest after Cynthia and Otto, as they passed, admiring Cynthia’s elderly elegant beauty, Otto’s powerful dignity, and determined there and then not to be content with Ruellyn, but to one day go out into the larger, busier world and make her way therein.
And then again, it was because Nell disliked dogs and wanted to overcome the fear that when she was thirteen she took a Saturday job at the Border Kennels, run by her best friend Brenda’s parents. You know my views on coincidence, reader, and will not be surprised to hear that it was to the Border Kennels that Arthur Hockney and his live-in girlfriend Sarah had taken the dog Kim for retraining, after its mistreatment at the hands of Annabel Lee; and that this was where they now left the animal whenever they went on holiday. Kim, the very dog which, made savage by hunger, bad treatment and evil commands, had once chased poor little Nell across Hackney Marshes! Now Nell steeled herself and patted him, and he smiled back. Dobermans do smile, when they want to be liked. To make this kind of observation about animals is, I know, to lay o
neself open to charges of anthropomorphism—the bad habit of attributing human characteristics to animals—but all I can do is repeat, Dobermans smile when they feel like smiling. I’ve seen it too often to doubt it.
CAUSE AND EFFECT
ONE NIGHT, WHEN NELL had stayed over at the kennels and was fast asleep in a strange bed, the police raided Faraway Farm. What had happened was this. As the receiving business had expanded, so had the rack and ruin. Rain fell onto antique leather through the barn roof, and ducks laid their eggs in eighteenth-century cedar chests, and moths got into the woolen interfaces of Henry V’s (alleged) gold doublet, and of course there were ugly scenes, from increasingly ugly customers. What could they expect? So Clive and Polly switched their interest from receiving stolen goods to the manufacture of LSD in the old pig-shed and eventually brought the full wrath of the police upon them, by way of a dawn raid, and drew to an end the idyll of Faraway Farm.
And, once again, Nell was homeless.
Now of course she was upset. How could she not be?
Everything that was familiar suddenly gone! Clive and Polly vanished from her life: Clive who had walked her to school when she was little; Polly who had sung to her in the bath. Ah it was sad, not to mention sudden. And yet, there was a kind of relief in it too. Nell had been developing more and more of late a kind of resistance—ingratitude, she sometimes felt—to her surrogate parents. She could see that she was exploited, that her hard work supported their idleness. That what was expected of her—no, not quite, because after all she did the offering—was all the same unreasonable. That she, in fact, was the child and they the adults, and it hadn’t been fair of them to pretend otherwise. When Clive and Polly disappeared into police custody—now you see them, now you don’t, like some kind of conjuring trick with which she was all too familiar—the difficult and complicated feelings disappeared with them.