The Hearts and Lives of Men (31 page)

The door was eventually opened by a young woman of half Chinese, half (as he was to discover later) Welsh descent. She was, Arthur thought, strikingly pretty. An overweight Doberman walked affectionately at her heels, and from the pocket of her green smock—which did a great deal for her green slanty eyes—she would take the occasional Marrow Bone Snack and casually feed the beast.

“We’re closed,” said Sarah Dobey, not unappreciative of Arthur’s own black good looks, “and not a moment too soon. Which agency are you from? Animal Rights, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Child Abuse, Fraud Squad, Hornby Electrics? We’ve had them all.” Arthur explained his business over dinner that evening. (Sometimes very pretty, very bright, too clever young girls are without boyfriends. What young man can stand the pace? Takes an older, more worldly man and they’re so often married or otherwise unavailable.) The Doberman went too, and curled up good as gold beneath the table, accepting scraps of Sarah’s vegetable pie and Arthur’s steak. Sarah was a vegetarian.

“Ellen Root?” Sarah exclaimed. “But that was the child who started the whole thing off!”

“Started what off?”

“The scandal! Of course they hushed it up as much as they could. It never got into the papers.”

And she told him what had happened. She, Sarah Dobey, had been working as a clerk in the local Welfare Office. (She was over qualified, of course, with her Master’s Degree in Philosophy, but who would employ her as a philosopher? Someone who looked like her? Look at her! Annabel Lee, housemother at Eastlake, had reported a child missing, apparently run away. A police search had altogether failed to find her. The Welfare Office, disturbed for some time by reports filtering through from Eastlake, sent Sarah in as a domestic, to see just what was going on.

“You can always tell a white woman’s character,” said Sarah, “from her behavior toward the cleaning staff, especially if that cleaning staff is what she would call black, brown or yellow and, I tell you, Annabel Lee’s character was bad, bad, bad! She covered up well for officials but, being the maid, I soon discovered that she bullied and tormented the children, kept the dogs underfed and locked up, and as for the housefather, although well-versed in child-care-and-development jargon, he was a toy-train enthusiast, and either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on, so long as he collected his salary and added to his collection.”

She, Sarah Dobey, had made her report, mailed it, and that very night, not knowing much about animals, but upset by their howling, had opened the door of the compound, and they’d leaped out. She hadn’t expected it. Annabel Lee had stumbled downstairs, to see what was going on, the dogs had jumped at her, and she had for some reason taken fright and fled across the marshes, pursued by the two animals—(“They only wanted to be taken for a walk!” said Sarah. “Poor things!”)—onto the roadway, where she had been hit by a passing truck, flung into the fast lane, and killed.

“I wish I could feel sorry,” said Sarah, “inasmuch as I daresay it was all my fault. I know I ought to, but somehow I can’t. I think it’s my Degree in Philosophy. It gives me a kind of perspective. Perhaps I need treatment?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Horace Lee had seemed more upset about having to dismantle his train set—for the Home was closed and the children, to their relief, dispersed—than about the death of Annabel Lee or the loss of his job.

“None so strange as folk,” sighed Sarah (who sometimes enjoyed using the vernacular as a relief from her usual measured spoken prose) and Arthur agreed. Oddly, he thought, there was something of Helen in Sarah—the high cheekbones, the limpid look—only in Sarah it was the look of the optimist, not the pessimist; someone who sees the answer in action, not in submission.

Anyway, Sarah had stayed on to supervise the closure and dismantling of Eastlake. She’d found a good home for one of the dogs, Kettle, but not for the other, now under the table, the one named Kim. But she didn’t know much about dogs, and couldn’t keep the animal for long.

“You might be overfeeding it,” said Arthur cautiously, and nudged the animal with his foot, and Kim looked up at him. “On the other hand,” added Arthur, “it’s just as well to keep this kind of dog happy.” He had a feeling the Eastlake dogs had taken justice into their own hands. These things happen. He raised his eyebrows at the dog, and Kim blinked back and laid his head on Arthur’s shoe.

“Well,” said Arthur, “I’ll be Kim’s guardian. He’ll need retraining and getting back into condition. I have friends who keep kennels on the Welsh border.”

And of course Sarah had relatives there and one way and another the connections between them crossed and recrossed and knotted themselves in the most thorough and satisfactory way. Which was, I think, the reward for Arthur’s steadfastness and resolution in relation to Nell, and for staying all night babysitting for Helen’s Edward, when another man in similar circumstances might simply have walked out. Good deeds get rewards sooner or later, though in unexpected ways.

Ellen Root, Sarah discovered, had disappeared on the night of the great Montdragon antiques robbery. It was known they’d taken the roadway. The whole episode had been peculiar. Ellen Root was a child without a history, an English child picked up wandering on a French roadway and now she was gone, as if she had never been.

“At least,” said Sarah, “she had the guts and sense to run! No one else did. And it was because she ran that Eastlake was closed, and not a moment too soon.”

“If the police couldn’t find her,” said Arthur, “I daresay it was because the villains did! Find them, find her.” He felt he knew by now the pattern of Nell’s fate. He had an instinct for these things and, of course, reader, as you know, he was right. Nell had gone into hiding, along with the stolen Chippendale bookcase.

Kim stretched up and licked his hand, and Arthur felt, suddenly and unexpectedly, that wherever Nell was, she was well and happy, and the dog somehow linked to her fortune, and his, and all he had to do was love Sarah and look after the dog, and one day, one day, fate would bring Nell to him. Life can change so suddenly for the better, reader. If you only forgive yourself, and allow yourself to be happy.

“W
HAT ON EARTH IS
in here?” asked Angie of Clifford, staring into the River Gallery at Leonardo’s, a long narrow room, newly opened, overlooking the Thames, its beautifully lit walls lined with what to her looked like a series of ragged scrawls.

“Children’s art,” said Clifford, shortly. She was on a flying visit. He was about to be the father of twins. Helen drifted around the Orme Square house, happy and languid and secure, barefooted and vast, somehow, gratifyingly, all his own doing. Being pregnant with twins is not usually easy, but Helen was relaxed and content, and only occasionally sighed and groaned. He would be with her in the hospital. Of course he would. If you lose one child, you don’t want to miss a moment of the next, even though it comes in the form of a double helping.

“What on earth,” asked Angie, “is Leonardo’s doing with children’s art?”

“Exhibiting it,” said Clifford as Angie tucked her arm in his. On her finger was a diamond ring the size of a plum. “Weetabix is sponsoring a children’s art exhibition. They asked us if they could use the new gallery. We said yes.”

“Good God,” she said. “Why? Where’s the profit in it?”

“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!

R
EADER, 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.