The Hearts and Lives of Men (33 page)

C
HRISTMAS DAY, 1978. WHAT
were you doing, reader? Count back, think back. We had turkey, I suppose—but wasn’t that the year we had a spectacular roast goose and mashed potato, and everything went right—or was it wrong? Painful, thinking back, if only because the faces around the Christmas table were all so much younger; but pleasant too, because most of our family histories, surely, will include each year a birth, a marriage, a twenty-first birthday, something happy to look back upon? Well, I hope so.

That was the year Nell spent Christmas morning going around the boarding kennels, showing those dogs lucky (or unlucky!) enough to have devoted if absentee owners the Christmas cards those owners had sent them. Brenda went with her.

“There, Pip,” they’d say, handing out a special Christmas Good Dog Chocolate Drop, “it’s from Mupsy and Pupsy, Happy Christmas, they write, and all our love!” A stroke and a pat, and on they’d go, two of a pair, two pretty bouncy lively girls, full of proper Christmas goodwill mixed up with mirth at the absurdity of their task. Clients are clients the world over, and their will must be done, especially on Christmas morning.

“There, Jax! Take a look! That’s a picture of a bone, a b-o-n-e, and that’s a Christmas ribbon around it. No, Jax, look at it, don’t eat it! Oh, Jax! It was from Mumsy and Dadsy, too!”

Kim the Doberman didn’t get a card. Arthur and Sarah, her owners, were too sensible for that. They did phone the kennels, though, so she could hear the sound of their voices. She pricked up her ears and wagged her tail, and Nell was sure she smiled. Kim always seemed especially fond of Nell, but Nell was never quite convinced she trusted Kim.

Clifford and Helen spent Christmas Day with Clifford’s parents, Otto and Cynthia. They took with them a nanny and the twins Marcus and Max, Edward, now nine, and also Edward’s father Simon Cornbrook. He had nowhere else to go for Christmas Day, and Helen was sorry for him. Janice was off covering a story in Reykjavik, or so she said. Their service flat was bleak and unhomely.

“Helen, this is absurd!” remonstrated Clifford. “Why should my parents have to put up with your ex-husband?”

“He’s not really an ex-husband,” said Helen. “He hardly ever counted as a husband.” Poor Simon, taken so seriously by the world—a lead journalist now, for
The Economist
—and so unseriously by everyone else! “I feel so bad about it all, and Edward would be thrilled—”

And Clifford capitulated but he was not pleased. And, reader, I am sorry to say that Angie Wellbrook, now back art-dealing in Johannesburg, phoned Clifford to wish him a merry Christmas, and if Clifford hadn’t been put out at having to sit at a table with a man—however entertaining and civilized—with whom his wife had once shared a bed, he might have answered more abruptly. As it was, he sounded quite friendly, and Angie resolved to fly over to the U.K. very soon. She thought that having twins might well have satiated Clifford with family life—and she was not far wrong.

John Lally, Helen’s father the painter, didn’t celebrate Christmas at all. That was the way he wanted it. He liked to pretend the day did not exist. Now although unable to report that John Lally regretted the way he had treated his wife during her lifetime, I can at least report with truth that he was lonely without her. Therefore he quickly found her substitute. Within a year of Evelyn’s death he was married to Marjorie Field, a very pleasant, competent, rather plain, mature student of Fine Arts, who thought he was wonderful, chivvied him along, and was happy enough to give up Christmas that year, any year, if he suggested it. She was having the kitchen rebuilt. During the afternoon Marjorie was pleased, on John’s behalf, to receive a phone call from Johannesburg, from a woman art-dealer, an Angie Wellbrook, who wanted to come over and “discuss John’s work.”

“Angie Wellbrook?” said John Lally. “Rings a bell … no, can’t remember! If she wants to waste her money flying over, when I’m already owned by the shysters of Leonardo’s, more fool her! Let her come!”

During that Christmas afternoon, Nell and Brenda made a secret excursion to Faraway Farm, and rescued Nell’s tin teddy bear from its hiding place. Nell unscrewed the head and took out the emerald pendant and held it in her closed hand.

“Think of me now,” she said aloud, “whoever you are, and whatever you are, just as now I think of you.” And at just about that time, Otto, in his Scandinavian fashion, raised a toast, and his wife and the guests rose to their feet and lifted their glasses.

“Here’s to our lost little Nell,” said Otto, Nell’s grandfather. “Whether she be in heaven or on earth. And may the memory of Nell remind us how important it is to value those we have, while we still have them.”

But of course it was Christmas, a time when it’s only natural to think of family lost or far away, so perhaps it was not all that much of a coincidence, after all.

W
E HEAR A GREAT
deal about the biological clock, reader, ticking away the childbearing years—indeed, I think we hear a great deal too much about it—and are thereby made unnecessarily anxious. Doctors shake their heads at us if we’re over thirty and contemplating a first child—and if we’re over forty seem to regard an ambition to get pregnant as repulsive and unreasonable. But the science that tells us about the risk by the elderly
primagravida
(that could be you and me, reader, pregnant for the first time and over thirty) is, my doctor asks me to remember, the same science that will diagnose and remove a fetus faulty by reason of maternal or paternal age. But then I’m lucky in my doctor—his mother was forty-six when he was born, and he certainly doesn’t want himself unborn, and nor do his patients. He told me the other day of a woman doctor in Paris, who, after a little hormonal juggling, gave birth to a perfectly successful baby when she was sixty—so courage, sisters all! Take the time you want deciding
to
, or deciding
not
to. I’m even sorry for Angie in this respect, though in no other, that she wanted Clifford’s baby, and here she was, already past forty, and hadn’t had it, and felt the desperation common to women who feel time is running out, forget Parisian women doctors, and would rather not have a baby at sixty, thank you very much! When Helen and Clifford remarried, Angie felt really quite miserable, ditched her pallid escort/lover Sylvester and returned to Johannesburg, there to start a branch of Leonardo’s. She had, after all, a major shareholding, and the directors could hardly stop her, though they feared her taste, and what she, a woman, would do to Leonardo’s image. She had inherited her father’s six gold mines too, as well as the Leonardo’s share, and ran them with scant regard for the human rights of her black employees. She was busy, respected, admired, and not loved. She lived in great luxury, and was very bored. Had she been a little nicer and kinder, she would have found fulfillment, perhaps, in bringing major European paintings over and enriching and refining the rather garish White African cultural scene—but Angie was not nice and kind. If the gallery-goers disliked a painting she despised their taste; if they liked it, she despised the painting for being liked by the people she despised. She couldn’t win against herself. She had a secret relationship with her black African butler and that was dreadful too; she despised him for fancying her, believed herself to be thoroughly unfanciable. The more she despised him, the more she despised herself, and vice versa. Well, we know all that about Angie already, and it’s a common enough predicament.

Angie, one boring Christmas Day, when the conversation around the swimming pool palled, and the mint juleps gave her indigestion and really made her feel her age, and an eighteen-year-old girl had the audacity to flutter her eyelashes at Angie’s butler, and she could swear the villain showed his white, white teeth in a responsive smile back—just the kind of day, in fact, that had she been living in Ancient Rome Angie would have had a few slaves beheaded, or in the American antebellum South had them severely beaten and the family broken up—decided it was time to upset a few people.

She would start by confusing her compatriots and buy a few surrealists. She’d go to England and dislodge John Lally from Clifford’s sticky fingers and if she had to unravel a few contracts on the way, too bad. Clifford would welcome a fight. She didn’t think she’d have much trouble getting him into bed. When had she ever? So long as she wore enough gold, or really precious stones, he capitulated. She imagined Helen, with her sweet simpers, would be beginning to pall. Surely by now! “I hate you, Helen,” Angie said aloud. Helen was passive, and faithless, and careless with Clifford’s love—yet she had it. And what’s more she had Clifford’s babies.

“Did you ask for something, ma’am?” inquired Tom the butler, solicitously. He was quite fond of Angie. He felt sorry for her, poor cold unpossessed thing.

“I did not, boy,” she said savagely. “I’ve had enough of you. You’re fired!” And so he was. No such thing in Johannesburg as a black accusing a white of unfair dismissal. Think himself lucky, his mother said—he was only twenty-two—not to be up on a rape charge. Such things happened.

And Angie flew into Heathrow.

O
TTO AND CYNTHIA WERE
not as young as they had been. (Well, who is? But you know what I mean.) Dannemore Court was beginning to seem too large for their comfort. The young can stride across large areas of parquet floor and take no notice of them; the old begin to feel that the hundred yards from front door to staircase is too much, and of course Cynthia, when not wearing her outdoor green Wellington boots, never went without high heels. (As I told you, she never quite belonged. She never
slopped
, as the English upper classes will.) Otto had slipped a disk and been told it was inadvisable for him to shoot, or ride, or bell-ring at the local church, which was his delight and the villagers’ pain. (“On and on, Sir Otto! You just never seem to tire,” from the Vicar’s wife) Sir Otto! Foreign names are just not made for English titles, there’s the truth of it. But here he was, a knight, who had never looked for it, or so he said. Who is up there who watches our behavior and thus so whimsically rewards us? Otto had headed the Confederation of British Industry at one time, of course, and had generously retired from the chairmanship of The Distillers’ (Northern Europe) to make way for a younger man—or was it what no one was saying? His service to this country in the war, and possibly ever since? Probably very lately. Be that as it may, Cynthia was now Lady Cynthia which, as she said, ensured her an appointment at a West End hair salon, but otherwise made no difference that she could see. The title was not hereditary. She turned up her elegant nose a little at that.

The new knight and his lady sat disconsolately after lunch one day, staring at their log fire, he gritting his teeth against the pain in his back, she with the pain in her side, for she had recently fallen while hunting and cracked four ribs. The modern practice is not to strap the rib cage in such cases, else the bones of those enduring the pain knit too tight for the good deep breaths of healthy, active life. When she moved she could feel the ribs grating. The telephone rang. It was Angie Wellbrook, a colleague of Clifford’s: did they remember? No, but were too polite to say so. She was in the neighborhood. She asked herself to supper. They sighed, and acquiesced.

“Such a lovely place,” Angie enthused. “So very English, so very special. But isn’t it rather large, for just the two of you?”

“We live here, we’ll die here,” said Otto gloomily.

“Please!” begged Cynthia, who hated talk of old age, let alone death. If you ignored it, Cynthia thought, it would go away.

“The heating bills!” mourned Angie, who’d never examined a heating bill closely in her life, and made them agree they were outrageous. Johnnie had made a rather fine French onion soup. It was the servants’ day off. Some skills are never forgotten. In the war Otto and he had a for a time run a restaurant in Paris, which doubled as a clearinghouse for RAF crew in transit, who had been shot down over France and rescued by the Resistance—trained men needed back home again. The finest onion soup in Paris made a good cover.

“And what do you keep horses
for
, if neither of you can ride?”

“I can ride,” said Cynthia, “and will again the minute my ribs are healed.” But her voice fell away. Perhaps she wouldn’t. Horses were so big. Somehow the distance between herself and the ground seemed to get greater every year.

“The outdoor life is so bad for the complexion,” said Angie, and Cynthia, staring rather unkindly at the younger woman’s sun-worn face, had to agree. Didn’t she use moisturizers? (If only she knew how Angie tried! Poor Angie. Wicked, wicked Angie!)

“The only time the house is properly filled is at Christmas,” said Otto, “when Clifford and Helen and the three children come down. Ridiculous to keep this great place going just for one week a year.”

“No it isn’t,” said Cynthia. “That’s what houses are for.”
Clifford, Helen and the three children.
It sounded so strong, so permanent. The kind of hollow that had always been in Angie’s heart, and made me say “poor Angie,” filled up quite suddenly with spite, and resentment, and hate. It should have been Clifford, Angie and the three children. She cursed her mother, her father, her fate. If she couldn’t build, she would destroy.

“Anyway, even if we wanted to, which we don’t, we can’t sell,” said Cynthia. “Who to? They’d only turn it into a computer center or a health club and cut down the trees and bulldoze my beautiful garden for a swimming pool.”

“I’ll buy it,” said Angie, brightly. “I need a home over here. I’ll keep it exactly as it is. I simply adore it. A part of old England. And you could all still come down for Christmas—you two, Clifford, Helen and the three children.”

“You couldn’t do that,” said Sir Otto, shocked. “We’d have to ask at least a quarter of a million.”

“A quarter of a million!” said Angie, in astonishment. “I wouldn’t dream of paying less than twice that. It’s worth at least half a million on the open market. Believe me, I know.”