The Hearts and Lives of Men (11 page)

He picked the baby up.

“Careful,” said Helen, but there was no need. Clifford was accustomed to handling objects of great value. And there and then he felt, to his surprise, and acutely, both the pain and pleasure of fatherhood—the piercing anxious needle in the heart which is the drive to protect, the warm reassuring glow which is the conviction of immortality, the recognition of privilege, the knowledge that it is more than just a child you hold in your arms, but the whole future of the world, as it works through you. More, he felt absurdly grateful to Helen for having the baby, making the feeling possible. For the first time since he had rescued her from the de Waldo Clinic, he kissed her with ungrudging love. He had forgiven her, in fact, and Helen glowed in his forgiveness.

“All be well,” she said, shutting her eyes and quoting something she had read, but not quite sure what: “—and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” and Clifford did not even snub her by asking for the source of the quotation. And so it was, very well indeed, for a time.

Until she was nearly a year old, then, Nell lived in the cocoon of happiness created by her parents. Leonardo’s flourished under Clifford Wexford’s guidance—an interesting Rembrandt was acquired, a few tedious Dutch Masters sold, the putative Botticelli labeled and hung as such, to the Uffizi’s astonishment, and in the new contemporary section, the price of a David Firkin (now required to paint no more than two paintings a year, lest he spoil his own market) soared to five figures. Helen lost fifteen pounds and worshipped Clifford and baby Nell in turns. It is even pleasanter—if more difficult—to love, than to be loved. When both happen at once, what higher joy can there be?

R
EADER, A MARRIAGE THAT
is rapidly put together can rapidly unravel: like a hand-knitted sweater, which if you snip just one strand and pull, and go on pulling, comes to nothing at all. Just a pile of wrinkled junk. Or put it another way: you think you’re living in a palace but actually it’s just a house of cards. Disturb one card and the whole lot falls and flattens and is nothing. When Nell was ten months old, the Wexford marriage fell in ruins about the poor child’s ears—phut, phut, phut—one nasty event falling fast upon another quicker than you can imagine.

This is how it happened.

The Conrans gave a Guy Fawkes Day fireworks party. Remember? Terence, who started Habitat? And Shirley, later of
Superwoman
and
Lace
? Everyone who was anyone was there, and that included the Wexfords.

Helen left Nell behind with the Nanny: she didn’t want the child frightened by bangs and crashes. She went ahead of Clifford, who was coming straight from Leonardo’s. She wore an embroidered leather coat and boots with many tassels, and looked slim, vulnerable, very pretty and tender, and somehow amazed, and slightly stunned, as young women recently married to active men do tend to look: that is to say, very attractive to other men, making them behave like stags in the rutting season, all locked mighty antlers and “I’ll have what’s yours, by God and nature that I will!” If she’d worn her old brown coat it mightn’t have happened.

Clifford arrived later than Helen expected. She felt sulky. Leonardo’s took up too much of his time and attention. Sausages crackled and hot potatoes went splut! in cinders; rockets rippled and fountains of light poured skyward, and cries of amazement and delight drifted on a light wind over Camden Town gardens, along with the bonfire smoke. There was a lot of rum in the hot toddy. If there had been less, none of it might have happened.

Helen looked through a veil of smoke and saw Clifford approaching. She forgave him: she began to smile. But who was that by his side? Angie? Helen’s smile faded. Surely not. Angie, last heard of, had been in South Africa. But yes, that’s who it was. Fur-coated, fur-hatted, high-leather-booted, miniskirted, showing the bare stretch of stockinged thigh fashionable at the time; Angie, smirking at Helen, even while Angie most affectionately squeezed Clifford’s hand. Helen blinked and Angie was gone. Worse still. What was she hiding? What collusion was this? Helen had kept Angie’s wedding-night phone call to herself, biting pain and insult back, forgetting it, putting it out of her mind. Or that’s what she thought she’d done. If only she had, and not just thought she had, none of it might have happened.

Clifford took Helen’s arm, comfortingly uxorious. Helen shook it petulantly free—never what a woman should do to a man of high self-regard. But she’d had four hot toddies, waiting for Clifford, and was less sober than she knew. If only she’d let him hold her arm. But no!

“That was Angie, you came with Angie, you’ve been with Angie.”

“It was, I did, I have,” said Clifford coolly.

“I thought she was in South Africa.”

“She’s over here helping me set up the Contemporary Section. If you took any interest at all in Leonardo’s, you’d know.”

Unfair! Wasn’t Helen going to daily courses in the History of Art, in order to catch up? Wasn’t she, at twenty-three, running a house with servants, and entertaining, and looking after a small child as well? Wasn’t she neglected by her husband for Leonardo’s sake? Helen slapped Clifford’s face (if only she hadn’t) and Angie stepped out of the bonfire smoke, and smiled again at Helen a little victorious smile, which Clifford didn’t see. (No suggesting Angie could have behaved other than how she did. No sirree!)

“You’re completely mad,” said Clifford to Helen, “insanely jealous,” and left the party forthwith with Angie. (Oh, oh, oh!)

Well, he was cross. No man likes to be hit in public, or accused of infidelity, without reason. And there certainly was no recent reason. Angie was biding her time. Her relationship with Clifford had of late indeed been bounded by Leonardo’s new Contemporary Section. Clifford had all but forgotten it had ever been anything else, or would he have brought Angie to the party? (If only he hadn’t! It is to Clifford’s credit that he, like Helen and unlike Angie, was capable of moral choice.)

Clifford took Angie back to her house in Belgravia and went straight home to Primrose Hill and listened to music and waited for Helen to come home. He decided to forgive her.

He waited until morning, and still she did not come. Then she rang to say she was at Applecore Cottage: her mother was ill. She put the phone down fast. Clifford had heard that one before—he sent Johnnie to check. Of course Helen was not at Applecore Cottage. How could she be? Her father still barred her from his door. The very folly of the lie compounded her offense.

And where had Helen been last night? Well, I’ll tell you. After Clifford had left the party with Angie on his arm, Helen, many hot toddies later, left it on the arm of a certain Laurence Durrance, scriptwriter, and husband of little Anne-Marie Durrance, neighbor and close friend. (After this particular choice of action, there was no going back. No more if-only’s. Flop, flop, flop, flop—down came the house of cards.)

Anne-Marie, four-foot-ten and six stone of
joli-laide
energy, stayed behind to weep and wail and tell
everyone,
very excitedly, that Helen Wexford had left the party with
her
husband Laurence. Not content with that, she wrung a confession out of Laurence the very next morning. (I took her to my office, snivelled Laurence. On the sofa. Very uncomfortable. You know all those books and papers. I was terribly drunk. Someone had spiked the hot toddy. She seemed so upset.
She
seemed so upset! cried Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie.
Just one of those things. Sorry, sorry, sorry.) And, having heard all that, and before Helen returned from wherever (staying with a girlfriend, actually, trying to compose herself, so great was her guilt), Anne-Marie went and told Clifford where Helen had been the night before, with many unnecessary and untrue embellishments.

So when Helen did come home, Clifford was unforgiving in the most permanent kind of way. Indeed, Johnnie was just finishing changing the locks. Helen was on the doorstep in the keen November wind: her husband and baby on the other side of a locked door, in the warm.

“Let me in, let me in,” cried Helen, but he didn’t. Even though Nell set up a sympathetic wail, his heart stayed hardened. An unfaithful wife was no wife of his. She was worse than a stranger to him: she was an enemy.

So Helen had to go to a solicitor, didn’t she, and Clifford was already seeing his—he wasted no time. Anne-Marie had barely finished her tale than he was on the phone—and a very powerful and expensive solicitor he was and not only that, Anne-Marie thereupon decided to take the opportunity of divorcing Laurence and citing Helen, and by Christmas not only one but two marriages had been destroyed. And the cocoon of warmth and love in which Nell lived had been unwound, faster than the eye could see let alone the mind comprehend it seemed to Helen, and words of hate, despair and spite filled the air around Nell’s infant head, and when she smiled no one returned her smile, and Clifford was divorcing Helen, citing Laurence, and claiming custody of their little daughter.

You may not know about the custom of “citing.” In the old days, when the institution of marriage was a stronger and more permanent thing than it is now, it was seen to need outside intervention to push asunder any married couple. A marriage didn’t just “irretrievably break up” as a result of internal forces. Someone came along and
did
something, usually sexual. That someone was known as “the third party.” Sheets would be inspected for evidence, photographs taken through keyholes by private detectives, and the third party cited by the aggrieved spouse and get his (her) name in the papers. It was all perfectly horrid; and even if neither spouse was sincerely aggrieved, but simply wanted to part, the motions of sheets and keyholes would have to be gone through. Mind you, every cloud has a silver lining; a whole race of girls grew up who would inhabit seaside hotels and provide required evidence, and who earned a good and frequently easy living, sitting up all night drinking cups of coffee and embracing only when the light through the keyhole suddenly went dark.

The only other mildly glittery lining to this particular cloud was that Helen made a kind of peace with her father—any enemy of Clifford was a friend of his, albeit his own daughter (
alleged
daughter: he would not give Evelyn the comfort of ceasing to disown Helen as his flesh and blood)—and was allowed back into the little back bedroom of Applecore Cottage to weep her shame and anguish away, there where the familiar robin sat on the apple-tree branch, just outside her bedroom window, red-breasted, head on one side, clucking and chirruping at her distress, promising her better times to come.

T
HERE ARE SOME BABIES
whom nobody fights over. If they are plain, or dull, or miserable or mopey, divorced and erring mothers are allowed to keep them and toil for them through the years. But what a charmer Nell was! Everyone wanted her: both parents, both sets of grandparents. Nell had a bright clear skin and a bright clear smile, and hardly ever cried, and if she did was quickly pacified. She was a hard and dedicated worker—and no one has to work harder than babies—when it came to developing her skills: learning to touch, to grasp, to sit, to crawl, to stand, to utter the first few words. She was brave, brilliant and spirited—a prize worth having, rather than a burden just about worth the bother of bearing. And how they fought over her.

“She isn’t fit to be a mother,” said Clifford to Van Erson, his freckled, ferocious solicitor. “She tried to abort the child. She never wanted it.”

“He only wants her to get back at me,” wept Helen to Edwin Druse, her gentle hippie adviser. “Please make him stop all this. I love him so much. Just that one stupid time, that silly party, I’d had too much to drink, I was only getting back at him for Angie. I can’t bear to lose Nell. I can’t. Please help me!”

Edwin Druse put out a gentle hand to soothe his distraught client. He thought she was too young to cope. He thought Clifford was a very negative kind of person indeed. She needed looking after. He thought perhaps he, Edwin Druse, would be the best person to do the looking after. He could convert her to vegetarianism, and she would no longer be prey to such despair. In fact he thought he and she could get on very well indeed if only Clifford and little Nell were out of the way. Edwin Druse was not perhaps the best legal representative Helen could have chosen, in the circumstances. However, there it was.

Add to that the fact that Clifford wanted Nell, and was in the habit of getting what he wanted, and you will see that in the struggle for her custody he had everything on his side. Money, power, clever barristers, outraged virtue—and his parents Otto and Cynthia behind him, to back him up with extra dollops of the same.

“Sweetness alone is not enough,” said Cynthia of Helen. “There must be some sense and discretion too.”

“A man can put up with many things from a wife,” said Otto, “but not being made a fool of in public.”

And Helen had nothing, except loveliness, and helplessness and mother-love, and Edwin Druse’s conscience, to put in the scales. And it was not enough.

Clifford divorced Helen for adultery, and there was no way she could deny the fact: what is more, Anne-Marie actually stood up there on the stand and testified, as she had done in her own divorce, “and I came home unexpectedly and found my husband Laurence in bed with Helen. Yes, it was the marital bed. Yes, the pair of them were naked.” Lies, all lies! Helen did not even try to counter-claim that Clifford had committed adultery with Angie Wellbrook—she did not want to bring him into public calumny, and Edwin Druse did not attempt to persuade her so to do. Helen was all too ready to believe she had lost Clifford through her own fault. Even while she hated him, she loved him: and the same could be said of him, for her. But his pride was hurt. He would not forgive, and she would not hurt him further. And so he came out of the divorce the innocent, and she the guilty party, and it was in all the papers for the space of a whole week. I am sorry to say that Clifford Wexford was never averse to the publicity. He thought it would be good for business and so it was.