The Hearts and Lives of Men (32 page)

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, oranges 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.

N
ELL, 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.

A
CTUALLY, 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 oneself 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.

O
NE 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.

And of course she’d been spending more and more time with the Kildares, staying the night, watching television (reception was better, just the other side of the hill), helping out in the kennels, sleeping on Brenda’s bottom bunk—Brenda always took the top—as if somehow she’d known what would happen at Faraway Farm, and had been preparing a second home, just in case. Well, she needed it now. She cried on Mrs. Kildare’s plump, kind shoulder; Mr. Kildare lent her his linen handkerchief—he refused to use tissues, saying they made his nose sore.

“She must live with us,” said Mr. Kildare.

“What about the authorities?” asked Mrs. Kildare. “There must be some kind of formality, surely.”

“I shouldn’t worry about formalities,” said Mr. Kildare. “She’s way under working age and doing four hours a day so what I say about Authority is, don’t stir them up. Let sleeping dogs lie!” And he laughed. Let sleeping dogs lie! It was night. Outside in their kennels they whined and grunted, gruffled and stirred, and snored and jerked in their slumber. And Nell and Brenda, with their Wellington boots and flashlights, made a good-night round just to see that all was well.

“I never liked the thought of Brenda’s bottom bunk lying idle,” said Mrs. Kildare, who liked things to be orderly.

The washing machine went day and night. Food was on the table at set times. Brenda and Nell sat down with washed hands, and though what there was to eat was mostly Birds Eye chicken pie and peas, or hamburgers and french fries, followed by chocolate delight or angel whip, they’d have done their homework, mixed the dogs’ food, cleaned out the kennels, and have an hour’s TV to look forward to before the good-night round. For Nell it was a rest from responsibility, and from freedom, which had come to her, perhaps, rather too young.

No one in Ruellyn mentioned Nell to the police. Let the child stay at the kennels, all agreed. They didn’t want to lose their Nell, their pride and joy, once winner of a Weetabix painting competition, the one of Under-Tens. The villagers formed around Nell the protective ring of their concern. It was from the milkman they’d first had tidings of the dawn raid on Faraway Farm. Dan had driven his van right into the middle of the police ring; well, how was he to know each bush had a policeman behind it? He’d been moved on, quickly enough, but the noise he managed to make seemed to have given the game away. He reckoned someone in the house had gotten out the back, and that someone was probably the real villain. Certainly it wasn’t Polly and Clive—they moved more slowly than even Ruellyn expected, and before they could so much as rub the sleepy-dust out of their eyes they were under arrest, and taking the whole blame for everything.

Dan had taken the news back to Miss Barton at the shop, and a quick phone call from her to the Kildares at the kennels had made sure that Nell stayed where she was.

“A child’s room at Faraway Farm? I think they did once have a niece for a month or so,” said Miss Barton to the nice Inspector. “But they were kind of sloppy people. I expect they just never got around to dismantling it.”

“Kind of sloppy people!” It was Ruellyn’s verdict on Clive and Polly, who spent Christmas Day 1978 in separate corrective centers. At Clive’s center they were allowed to watch
Bridge on the River Kwai
as a special treat. At Polly’s center someone had made a mistake in the ordering and
Mary Poppins
was screened. But everyone quite liked it, especially Polly. She had a nice nature, and I’m glad she only got two years. Clive got eight, for manufacturing and dealing in illegal drugs.