The Hearts and Lives of Men (8 page)

“He had a hard childhood,” said Cynthia. “He feels the need to survive, and to survive he has to scheme. It is our example; it is what we did, you and I, and he watched us.”

“But he is the child of peace,” said Otto. “And we were the children of war. Why is it that the products of peace are always so ignoble?”

“Ignoble!”

“He has no moral concern, no political principle; he is eaten up by self-interest.”

“Oh dear,” said Cynthia, but she did not argue. “Well,” she said, “I hope this one makes him happy. Do you find her attractive?”

“I see what he sees in her,” said Otto cautiously. “But she’ll lead him a dance.”

“She’s soft and natural, not like me. She’ll make a good mother. I look forward to grandchildren. We may do better with the next generation.”

“We’ve waited long enough,” said Otto.

“I just hope he settles down.”

“He’s too fidgety to settle down,” said Otto, serenely, and they both slept.

Helen wept a little when she returned to Clifford’s home, Clifford’s bed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I just wish my parents were coming to my wedding,” she said, “that’s all.” But in her heart she was glad. Her father would only make some kind of scene; her mother turn up in the old blue ribbed cotton dress, her eyes red-rimmed from the previous night’s row. No. Better forget them. If only now she weren’t beginning to feel sick in the mornings. There still might well be reasons—the change in routine, the nights of wild love-making, the many dinners out—and she so accustomed to frugal student’s fare, or the pork, beans and cider-if-you’re-lucky routine of the Lally household—but it was beginning to seem unlikely. No quick pregnancy tests in those days, no vacuum abortions on the side. Just, for the former, a toad which got injected with your urine and laid eggs and died forty-eight hours later if you
were
pregnant, and laid eggs and survived if you weren’t, and for the latter an illegal operation which you, like the toad, had to be lucky, or very rich, to survive.

But of course the mere fact of worrying could so upset your cycle you never knew where you were. Oh, reader, what days! But at least then the penalty for untoward sex was a new life and not, as it can be now, a disagreeable and disgraceful death.

Another month and Helen could not disguise from herself the fact that she was in fact and in truth pregnant, and that she didn’t want to be, and that she didn’t want Clifford to know, let alone his parents, and that to go to doctors (two were required) for a legal abortion would require more lies about how damaging to her health and sanity pregnancy would be than she—so sane and healthy—could sustain, and that she couldn’t tell her friends because she couldn’t trust them not to gossip, and her father would kill her if he knew and her mother simply commit suicide—around and around the thought flew in Helen’s head, and there was no one she could turn to for help and advice, until she thought of Angie.

Now, reader, you may think this is no more than Helen deserved, to turn for help to a woman who bore her nothing but malice, however good—and she was
very
good—at disguising it Angie had so far been: giving little dinners for the handsome young couple, chatting away to Helen on the phone, recommending hairdressers and so on—but I do beg you to feel as forgiving as you can about Helen and this initial rejecting of her newly conceived child, our beloved Nell.

Helen was young and this was her first child. She had no idea, as established mothers have, of what she would be throwing away, losing along with the bathwater. It is easier for the childless woman to contemplate the termination of a pregnancy, than for those who already have children. So, please, continue to bear with Helen. Forgive her. She will learn better with the years, I promise you.

H
ELEN ROSE OUT OF
her snowy white bed one morning, holding her pale, smooth stomach, which was in inner turmoil, and telephoned Angie.

“Angie,” she said, “please come over. I have to talk to someone.

Angie came over. Angie walked up the stairs and into the bedroom where she had spent four memorable if actually rather unsatisfactory nights with Clifford, in all their eleven months together. Well, not exactly together, but in the promise of—eventually—together, or so she had assumed.

“So, what’s the matter?” Angie asked, and noticed, for Helen was feeling too ill to so much as fasten her brown silk nightie properly, that Helen’s white, full breasts were fuller than ever, almost too full, and felt for once rather proud of the chic discretion of her own, and quite confident that, if she managed this right, Clifford would eventually be hers.

Helen didn’t reply. Helen flung herself back upon the fur bedspread and lay crumpled and disheveled but still beautiful, and wept instead of speaking.

“It can only be one thing,” said Angie. “You’re pregnant. You don’t want to be. And you don’t dare tell Clifford.”

Helen did not attempt to deny it. Angie was wearing red hot-pants, and Helen did not even have the spirit to marvel at Angie’s nerve, considering her legs, in so doing. Presently words formed out of tears.

“I can’t have a baby,” wept Helen. “Not now. I’m too young. I wouldn’t know what to do with one.”

“What any sensible person does with babies,” said Angie, “is hand them over to nannies.”

And this, of course, in the world in which Angie moved, was just what mothers did. But for all that Helen was only twenty-two and (as we have seen) as selfish and irresponsible as any other pretty, willful girl of her age, she at least knew better than Angie in this respect. She knew that the handing over of a baby would be no easy matter. A baby draws love out of its mother, and the necessities occasioned by that love can change the mother’s life altogether, making her as desperate, savage and impulsive as any wild animal.

“Please help me, Angie,” said Helen. “I can’t have the baby. Only I don’t know where to go and anyway abortions cost money and I don’t have any.”

Nor had she, poor girl. Clifford was not the kind of man to put money in a woman’s bank account and not ask for proof of where every penny had gone, not even if that woman was his legitimate fiancée. Clifford might eat at the best restaurants, where it was useful to be seen, and might sleep between the finest, most expensive cotton sheets, because he liked to be comfortable, but he kept very careful accounts. So this had to be done without Clifford’s knowing. What a fix Helen was in! Just consider the times. Only twenty years ago, and a pregnant girl, unmarried, was very much on her own: no Pregnancy Advice Centers then; no payments from the State, just trouble whichever way she turned. Helen’s best friend, Lily, at seventeen, had an apparently successful abortion but after two days had been rushed to the hospital with septicemia. She’d hovered between life and death for some six hours, and Helen sat on one side of the bed and a policeman sat on the other, and he was waiting to charge Lily with procuring an illegal abortion operation. Lily died, and so was spared the punishment. Probably two years behind bars, the policeman said, and no more than she deserved. “Think of the poor baby!” he said. Poor little Lily, was all Helen could think. Now how frightened she found herself: frightened to have the baby, frightened not to.

Angie thought fast. She was wearing fashionable hot-pants but did not (as we know) have the best legs in the world. They were pudgy around the knees, and gnarled about the ankles; and as for her face, well, the thick makeup the times required was unkind and the hot South African sun had toughened her skin, and somehow grayed it, and she had a thick, fleshy nose. Only her eyes were large, green and beautiful. Helen, curled up on the bed, tearful and unhappy, soft, pale, female, tugging at her brown silk nightie (suddenly too small) in the attempt to make it cover her properly, and altogether too beautiful, inspired in Angie a great desire for revenge. It is really not fair that some women should have the luck of looks, and others not. You must agree.

“Darling Helen,” said Angie. “Of course I’ll help you! I know an address. An excellent clinic. Simply everyone goes there. Very safe, very quiet, very discreet. The de Waldo Clinic. I’ll lend you the money. It just has to be done. Clifford wouldn’t want you pregnant at his wedding. Everyone would think he’d married you because he had to! And it’s going to be a white wedding too, isn’t it, and simply everyone looks at waists.”

Simply everyone, simply everyone! Enough to frighten anyone.

Angie booked Helen into the de Waldo Clinic that very afternoon. Helen had the misfortune—rather expected by Angie—of being put into the care of a certain Dr. Runcorn, a small, plump, fiftyish doctor with thick glasses through which he stared at Helen’s most private parts, while his stubby fingers moved lingeringly (or so it seemed to Helen) over her defenseless breasts and body. What could the poor girl do about it? Nothing. For in handing herself over to the de Waldo Clinic it seemed that Helen had surrendered dignity, privacy and honor; she felt she had no right to brush Dr. Runcorn’s hand away. She deserved no better than its tacky assault. Was she not doing away with Clifford’s baby without his knowing? Was she not outside the law? Whichever way she looked, there was guilt, and Dr. Runcorn’s glinting eyes.

“We don’t want to leave the little intruder in there any longer than we have to,” said Dr. Runcorn, in his wheezy, nasal voice. “At ten tomorrow we’ll set about getting you back to normal! A shame for a girl as pretty as you to waste a single day of her youth.”

The little intruder! Well, he wasn’t so far off. That’s what Nell felt like, to Helen. But the phrase still made her squirm. She said nothing. She knew well enough that she depended on Dr. Runcorn’s goodwill as well as on his greed. No matter how much he charged, his clinic was always full. If he “did you” tomorrow, rather than in four weeks’ time, you were, quite simply, in luck. For the first time in her life Helen truly understood necessity, truly suffered, and held her tongue.

“Next time you go to a party,” said Dr. Runcorn, “remember me and don’t get up to mischief. You’ve been a very naughty girl. You’ll stay in the clinic tonight, so we can keep an eye on you.”

And a very terrible night it was. Helen was never to forget it. The thick yellowy carpets, the pale green washbasin, the TV and the radio headphones did nothing to disguise the nature of the place she was in. As well train roses up the abattoir wall! And she had to call Clifford, and tell another lie.

It was six o’clock. Clifford was at Leonardo’s, negotiating the purchase of an anonymous painting of the Florentine School with a delegation from the Uffizi Gallery. Clifford had a shrewd notion the painting was a Botticelli; he was banking on it, paying over the odds to obtain it but not too much in case they looked too hard at what they were selling. Just sometimes the Italians, accustomed as they were to a sheer superfluity of cultural richness, did miss something wonderful and extraordinary beneath their very noses. Clifford’s blue eyes were bluer than ever. He tossed back the wedge of his thick fair hair so it glinted—he had grown his hair long, as was the fashion then amongst the sophisticated young, and was not thirty-five still young? He wore jeans and a casual shirt. The Italians, portly and in their fifties, displayed their cultural and worldly achievement with formal suits, gold rings and ruby cuff links. But they were at a disadvantage. They were confused. Clifford meant to confuse them. What was this young man, who belonged so much to the present, doing within these solid elderly marble portals? It unbalanced the Italians’ judgment. Why was Clifford Wexford of all people foraging back into the past? What did he mean by it? Did he know more than they, or less? Was he offering too much? Were they asking too little? Where were they? Perhaps life was not serious and difficult after all? Perhaps the plums went to the frivolous? The telephone rang. Clifford answered it. The men from the Uffizi clustered together and conferred, recognizing a reprieve when they heard one.

“Darling,” said Helen brightly, “I know you hate being disturbed in the office, but I won’t be at Coffee Place when you get back tonight. My mum called to say I was allowed home. So I’m going to stay at Applecore Cottage for a couple of nights. She says she might even come to the wedding!”

“Take garlic and a crucifix,” said Clifford. “And ward your father off!”

Helen laughed lightly and said, “Don’t be such a goose!” and hung up. The men from the Uffizi raised their price a full thousand pounds. Clifford sighed.

The phone rang again. This time it was Angie. Since such considerable millions of her father’s money were invested in Leonardo’s, the switchboard put through her call. This privilege was accorded only to Helen, Angie, and Clifford’s stockbroker; the last played a chancy game of instant decisions and played it very well, but sometimes needed a quick yes or no.

“Clifford,” said Angie, “it’s me, and I want to have breakfast with you tomorrow.”

“Breakfast, Angie! These days,” he said, trying to keep the Uffizi mesmerized with his smile, and hoping Angie would get off the line quickly, “I have breakfast with Helen. You know that.”

“Tomorrow morning you won’t,” said Angie, “because she won’t be there.”

“How do you know that?” He sensed danger. “She’s gone to visit her mother. Hasn’t she?”

“No she hasn’t,” said Angie flatly, and would elaborate no further and Clifford agreed to meet the next morning at 8
A.M.
for breakfast at Coffee Place. The early hour did not, as he had hoped, discourage her. He’d suggested Claridges but she said he might need to scream and shout a bit so he’d be better off at home. Then she hung up. The men from the Uffizi pushed up the price a further five hundred and would not be deflected and by now Clifford had lost his nerve. He reckoned the two phone calls had cost him fifteen hundred pounds. When the Italians had gone, smiling, Clifford, unsmiling, made a quick phone call to Johnnie, his father’s stable-man and chauffeur—a man who’d been with Otto in the war, and still had a double-O rating—and asked him to visit the Lally household and investigate. Johnnie reported back at midnight. Helen was not in the house. There was only a middle-aged woman, crying into her dishwater, and a man in the garage painting what looked like a gigantic wasp stinging a naked girl.