The Hearts and Lives of Men (17 page)

A
RTHUR HOCKNEY WAS OUT
of Nigeria via Harvard and New York. He was very tall, very broad and elegantly black. He traveled the world for Trans-Continental Brokers as an insurance investigator. If a ship sunk in the China Seas, he’d turn up to find out why. If a presidential palace was destroyed in Central Africa, there would Arthur Hockney be, assessing villainy or genuine loss. Where he went, crowds parted, and gave up their secrets. So large, strong, shrewd was he, so adept at tracing and outfacing the sharks and vipers of the world, that only the good and the guiltless seemed prepared to argue with him at all. Trans-Continental Brokers paid him well. Very well. He had had some conversations with Clifford, Helen and Simon. He had seen the tail section swung by crane out of the shallow water a little upshore; noticed the tracery of cracks typical of metal fatigue, rather than the gross fractures of impact; observed the two intact seats, their seat belts unfastened. Perhaps the seats had simply been unoccupied. But why then was the ashtray of one full to overflowing, the torn top of a packet of children’s candy under the floor of the other? Careless cleaning by ZARA Airlines, or occupancy during the flight? He would be happier if the body of Mr. E. Blotton—to whom his attention was directed, inasmuch as he alone of the passengers had bought extra flight insurance, and whose character and profession he knew—had been identified. But it had not. However, he would have to await the arrival of the unfortunate Mrs. Blotton to be sure. And where was the body of little Nell Wexford? Out to sea? Possible. Yet the man and the child had been booked into the nonsmoking section; all the neighboring bodies had been found, more or less intact. Again, he would have to wait. The child’s father had refused to enter the identification hut. Well, he could understand that, considering the circumstances in which the child was on the plane. And no matter how tactfully it was arranged, how much obliterating plastic sheeting used, the process of identification could only be traumatic. All the same, most parents preferred to see, and know, rather than believe the unbelievable, on hearsay. The child’s stepfather was in there now—he had kept his wife away, perhaps rightly, perhaps not. To stand amidst the evidence of mortality, the bits and pieces of human flesh, the scraps of property, the trash left when the soul has departed, soon ceases to be gruesome; rather it becomes evidence of the wonder and value of life. (Or so Arthur Hockney had come to see it. Well, he had to, didn’t he. It was that or give up a job which involved him as much with the dead as the living.) Look, strange things happened! Bodies simply went missing. For all Arthur Hockney knew, the child might have been snatched up by a golden eagle and carried away to a Swiss mountaintop, Blotton’s body dragged out to sea by a giant squid. Because a thing was improbable didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Not for Arthur Hockney the notion that the simplest and most likely explanation was the right one, and it was for this reason that he was Trans-Continental’s highest-paid and most successful investigator. That, and because of what he sometimes referred to dismissively as his sixth sense. He just sometimes
knew
what it was unreasonable for him to know. He didn’t like it but there it was. There was some pattern to human affairs observable by him and apparently no one else.

Arthur went over to where Helen sat, so quietly and sadly, in that gray place, on that gray day. She turned her face toward him. He thought she was both the loveliest and the saddest woman he had ever seen. He did not let his thoughts go beyond that. She was distressed, pregnant, a married woman: out of bounds. All the same, he knew he would see her again, many times, that she would be part of his life. He tried not to think about this, either.

“They haven’t found her yet, have they,” she said, surprising him with the lightness in her voice.

“No.”

“Well, Mr. Hockney, they won’t. Nell isn’t dead.” The ashen misery seemed to drain away even as he looked. Perhaps she found some strength in him, used his clear eyes momentarily to see through to the truth of things, shared his gift for prescience, just long enough for it to work. She actually smiled. A cold evening wind had sprung up and swirled eddies of drier sand along the damp beach, making the prettiest of pretty, timeless patterns. “I expect you think I’m mad,” she said. “Because how could anyone live through that?” And she indicated the mangled wreckage of ZOE 05, still strewn so horribly all about.

Hard to believe that the beach would ever again be a playground for children with buckets and spades—but of course eventually it was. That same spot is today the site of the big campsite “Canvas Beach Safari.” I think myself it is a desolate place; somehow tragedy seeps through from other groundsheets and makes even the sunniest day melancholy, and the sea seems to sigh and whisper, and when the wind gets up it’s a lament—but there! Northern France shouldn’t pretend to be the Mediterranean coast, the climate just isn’t right for camping holidays. Perhaps that’s all it is!

“People live through amazing things,” he said cautiously. “A stewardess once fell twenty thousand feet out of an aircraft, landed in a snow drift, and lived to tell the tale.”

“Her father thinks she’s dead,” said Helen. “But then he would. And so does Simon. So does everyone. So I expect I am mad.”

He asked if her daughter had liked Dolly Mixtures.

“Not had liked,” said Helen, furiously. “Does she like? No, she doesn’t. She has more sense,” and then she began to weep and he apologized. It was the kind of detail, he knew, that always wrenched the heart of the bereaved—the little, everyday, apparently unimportant things, the likes and dislikes of the dead which in retrospect add up to the sum of a personality, but which in life went unremarked. But it had to be asked, though the answer made Nell’s survival yet more unlikely.

It had been, of course, Mr. Blotton’s instinct to pick out; in passing, the very candy Nell most scorned
(
“
Dolly
mixtures? I am not a dolly!”) to keep her quiet on the flight. As if, like some recalcitrant animal, she had needed to be kept quiet in the first place! And then, because she made a face, Mr. Blotton had eaten them all, every one, himself, to get even. What a disagreeable man he was. The more I think of him the more disagreeable he gets.

“I don’t know what I think,” she said, when she had stopped crying. Her faith was slipping away. He felt he had no right to restore it; what kind of proof was conviction? She shivered, and he placed her coat more securely around her shoulders, and led her back to sit in his hired car, out of the wind, and went back to be amongst the perplexing but unperplexed dead. Mrs. Blotton, he was told, had arrived. He spoke to her. She was a plain, respectable woman in her early forties. She had sandy eyelashes and prominent blue eyes. She did not like black men, he could tell, even a black man such as he, who looked so like Sydney Poitier in
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Sheer good looks, a fine suit, and a persuasive, educated voice could usually overcome the most stubborn racial prejudice. But there were always a few women, he knew, especially of Mrs. Blotton’s type, pale, Northern women, inhibited, who could never overcome theirs. Well, they didn’t even try: black to them meant a fearful, rampant sexuality. If only they knew just how discreet, how vulnerable, how reticent, how dependent on true love his sexuality was, and how he longed for that rare, releasing emotion—but this was the house of death, not life, and their miserable racism their problem, hardly his.

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.