The Hearts and Lives of Men (9 page)

C
LIFFORD SPENT AS BAD
a night as did Helen; one that he was never to forget. Into the great bubbling cauldron of distress we call jealousy goes dollop after dollop of every humiliation we have ever endured, every insecurity suffered, every loss we have known and feared; in goes our sense of doubt, futility; in goes the prescience of decay, death, finality. And floating to the top, like scum on jam, the knowledge that all is lost: in particular the hope that someday, somehow, we can properly love and trust and be properly loved and trusted in our turn. Plop! into Clifford’s cauldron went the fear that he had only ever been admired and envied, and never truly liked, not even by his parents. Plop! the knowledge that he would never be the man his father was, that his mother saw him as some kind of curiosity. Plop! the memory of a call-girl who’d laughed at him, despising him more than he despised her, and plop! and plop! again, other occasions he had been impotent, and embarrassed; not to mention school, where he’d been fidgety, weedy, skinny, short when others had been tall—he didn’t start growing until he was sixteen—and the hundred daily humiliations of childhood. Poor Clifford; both too tough and too sensitive for his own good! How these ingredients stirred and boiled and moiled into a great solid tarry wedge of distress, sealed by the shuddering conviction that Helen was in someone else’s arms as he lay unsleeping in their bed, that Helen’s lips were pressed beneath the searching mouth of someone younger, fiercer, kinder, yet more virile—no, Clifford was never to forget that night; nor, I’m afraid, was he ever properly to trust Helen again, so potent was the trouble brewed by Angie.

At eight o’clock the doorbell rang. Unshaven, distracted, drugged by his own imaginings, affected by a woman as he had never thought possible, Clifford opened the door to Angie. “What do you know?” he asked. “Where is she? Where is Helen?”

Still Angie wouldn’t tell him. She walked up the stairs and took her clothes off, and lay down upon the bed, rather quickly covering herself with the sheet, and waited.

“For old times’ sake,” she said. “And for my father’s millions. He’ll need some consoling about the Botticelli, if it is one. I keep telling you, money is in Modern Art, not in Old Masters.”

“It’s in both,” he said.

Now what Angie said was persuasive. And she was, to Clifford, familiar territory, and he was distracted beyond belief and anyway Angie was
there.
(I think we have to forgive him, yet again.) Clifford joined her on the bed, tried to pretend it was Helen there beneath him, and almost succeeded, and then on top of him, and totally failed. He knew the moment it was over that he regretted it. Men do seem to regret these things even more easily than do women.

“Where is Helen?” he asked, as soon as he was able.

“She’s in the de Waldo Clinic,” said Angie, “having an abortion. The operation is booked for ten this morning.”

It was by that time 8:45. Clifford dressed, in haste.

“But why didn’t she tell me?” he asked. “The little fool!”

“Clifford,” said Angie, languorously from the bed, “I can only suppose because it isn’t your baby.”

That slowed him down. Angie knew well enough that if you have just deceived your one true love, as Clifford had just done, you are all the more ready to believe you are yourself deceived.

“You’re so trusting, Clifford,” added Angie, to Clifford’s back, and it was a pity for her that she did, for Clifford caught a glimpse of Angie in the big wall-mirror, gold-mounted and mercury-based, three hundred years old, in which a thousand women must have stared, and it somehow cast back a strange reflection of Angie. As if indeed she was the wickedest woman who had ever looked into it. Angie’s eyes glinted with what Clifford suddenly perceived was malice, and he realized, too late to save his honor, but at least in time to save Nell, what Angie was up to. He finished tying his tie.

Clifford said not another word to Angie; he left her lying on the fur rug on the bed, where she had no right to be—it was after all Helen’s place—and was at the de Waldo Clinic by 9:15 and it was fortunate there was at least some time to spare, for the reception staff was obstructive and the operation had been brought forward by half an hour. Dr. Runcorn, I have a terrible feeling, could not wait to get his hands on Helen’s baby and destroy it from within. Abortion is sometimes necessary, sometimes not, always sad. It is to the woman as war is to the man—a living sacrifice in a cause justified or not justified, as the observer may decide. It is the making of hard decisions—that this one must die that that one can live in honor and decency and comfort. Women have no leaders, of course; a woman’s conscience must be her General. There are no stirring songs to make the task of killing easier, no victory marches and medals handed around afterwards, merely a sense of loss. And just as in war there are ghouls, vampires, profiteers and grave-robbers as well as brave and noble men, so there are wicked men, as well as good, in abortion clinics and Dr. Runcorn was an evil man.

Clifford pushed aside a Jamaican nurse and two Scottish orderlies—all three fed up with wages in the public sector and so gone into private health care, or so they told their friends—and since no one would tell him where Helen was, he stalked along the shiny, pale corridors of the Clinic, throwing open doors as he went, doing without help. Startled, unhappy women, sitting up neatly in bed in frilly or fluffy bedjackets, looked up at him in sudden hope, as if perhaps there at last was their savior, their knight in shining armor, he who was to come if all was to be explained, made happy and well. But of course it was not so: he was Helen’s, not theirs.

Clifford found Helen on a trolley in the theater annex, white-gowned, head turbaned; a nurse bent over her; Helen was unconscious, ready to go into the theater. Clifford tussled with the nurse for possession of the trolley.

“This woman is to go back to the ward at once,” he said, “or by God I’ll have the police in!” And he pinched her fingers nastily in the trolley’s steering mechanism. The nurse yelled. Helen did not stir. Dr. Runcorn emerged to see what the matter was.

“Caught red-handed!” said Clifford, bitterly, and indeed Dr. Runcorn was. He had just disposed of twins, rather late on in a pregnancy, and a very messy matter it had been. But Dr. Runcorn prided himself on his record for twins—not out of his clinic those frequent cases where one twin has been aborted, the other gone on, unobserved by everyone but a bewildered mother, to full term. No, if there was a twin, Dr. Runcorn would weed it out.

“This young lady is about to have an exploratory examination of her abdomen,” he said, “of her own free will. And since you are not married to her, you have no legal rights in the matter.”

At this Clifford simply hit him, and quite right too. Just occasionally violence can be seen to be justified. In his life Clifford was to hit three men. The first was Helen’s father, who tried to prize him apart from Helen, the second was Dr. Runcorn, who was trying to deprive him of Helen’s baby, and the third we have not come to yet, but that was to do with Helen too. This is the effect some women have on some men.

Dr. Runcorn fell to the ground and got up with his nose bloodied. I am sorry to say none of his staff assisted him. He was not liked.

“Very well,” he said wearily, “I will call a private ambulance. On your own head be it.”

And as the ambulance doors closed he remarked to Clifford, “You’re wasting your time on this one. These girls are nothing but sluts. I don’t do what I do for money. I do it to spare the babies a hellish future, and to save the human race from genetic pollution.”

Dr. Runcorn’s puffy face was puffier still from Clifford’s blow, and his fingers were like red garden slugs; he seemed, all of a sudden, to want Clifford’s approval, as the defeated so often do of the victor, but such was not of course forthcoming. Clifford merely despised Dr. Runcorn the more thoroughly for his hypocrisy, and a little of that despising rubbed off, alas, on Helen, as if—quite leaving aside the purpose of her visit to the de Waldo Clinic—the mere stepping inside so awful and vulgar a place had been enough to taint her, and permanently.

The ambulance men carried the still-unconscious Helen up the stairs of the Goodge Street house, and laid her on the bed, suggested Clifford call a doctor, and departed. (The de Waldo Clinic was later to send a bill, which Clifford declined to pay.) Clifford sat beside Helen, and watched, and waited and thought. He didn’t call a doctor. He reckoned she’d be all right. She breathed easily. Anesthesia had passed into sleep. Her forehead was damp, and her pretty hair curled and clung in dark tendrils which framed her face. Fine veins in her white temples showed blue; thick eyelashes fringed pale translucent cheeks; her eyebrows made a delicate yet confident arch. Most faces need animation to make them beautiful: Helen’s was flawless even in tranquillity; as near the perfection of a painting as Clifford was ever likely to find. His anger, his outrage, failed. This rare creature was the mother of his child. Clifford knew that Angie’s insinuations were absurd, by virtue of the sheer intensity of the feelings that welled up in him when he considered how narrow his baby’s escape had been. This had been the first act of rescue. He did not doubt but that there would be others. He could see all too clearly that Helen was capable of deceit and folly, and lack of judgment, and worst of all, lack of taste. His child, brushed so near, so early, to the appalling Dr. Runcorn! And as Helen grew older these qualities would become more apparent. The baby must be protected. “I’ll look after you,” he said aloud. “Don’t worry.” Absurdly sentimental! But I think he meant Nell, not Helen.

Clifford should have been at Leonardo’s that afternoon. The Hieronymus Bosch Exhibition was to be extended another three months. There was a great deal to be done, if the maximum publicity for the Gallery, the maximum advantage for himself, was to be gained. But still Clifford did not leave Helen’s side. He let his fingers stray over her forehead. He had wanted her from the moment he saw her: so that no one else could have her and because she was John Lally’s daughter, and because that in the end would open more doors to him than Angie’s millions ever would—but he had not known until the torment of the previous night just how much he loved her, and in the loving exposed himself to danger. For what woman was ever faithful? His mother Cynthia had betrayed his father Otto half a dozen times a year, and always had. Why should Helen, why should any woman, be different? But now there was the child—and in that child Clifford focused all emotional aspiration, all trust in human goodness, quite bypassing poor Helen, who had been trying to save Clifford as well as herself.

Helen stirred, and woke, and seeing Clifford, smiled. He smiled back.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You still have the baby. But why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was frightened,” she said simply. And then she added, abandoning herself to his care, “You’ll just have to look after everything. I don’t think I’m fit.”

Clifford, conscious of simply everyone and thickening waists, rang his parents and said no church wedding, after all. He’d rather make it the Caxton Hall.

“But that’s only a trumped-up registry office,” complained Cynthia.

“Everyone who’s anyone gets married there,” he said. “And this is a modern marriage. God need not be present.”

“Or only his substitute here on earth,” said Cynthia.

Clifford laughed and did not deny it. And at least he’d said “everyone” and not “simply everyone.”

T
HE WEDDING BETWEEN CLIFFORD
Wexford and Helen Lally took place on Midsummer’s Day, 1965. Helen wore a cream satin dress, trimmed with Belgian lace, and everyone said she should have been a model, she was so exquisite. (In fact Helen was altogether too robust in her early twenties to be anything of the sort. It was only later, when trouble, love and general upset had fined her down that she might have thought of earning, thus, a living.) Clifford and Helen made a spectacular pair; his leonine hair shone, and her brown hair curled, and everyone who was anyone was at the wedding. Everyone, that is to say, except the bride’s father, John Lally. The bride’s mother, Evelyn, sat at the back wearing the same old blue ribbed dress she had worn at the party where Clifford and Helen first met and fell in love. She had defied her husband to attend the ceremony. It would mean a week of not speaking, possibly more. She did not care.

Simon Harvey, the New York writer, was Clifford’s best man. Clifford had known him from way back: had met him in a pub, lent him his first typewriter. Now he had to lend him the fare over, but a friend’s a friend, and though Clifford’s acquaintances were many, his friends were few. Simon wrote funny novels on homosexual themes, too early for their popularity. (The word “gay” was only just finding its feet; to be homosexual a deathly earnest, whispered matter.) Soon he would be a millionaire, of course.

“What do you think of her?” Clifford asked.

“If you have to marry a woman,” Simon said, “she’s the best you could do.” Nor did he lose the ring, and he made an affectionate speech; it was worth the airfare, which Clifford knew he would never get back.

Helen’s Uncle Phil, Evelyn’s brother, gave her away. He was a car salesman; middle-aged, red-faced and noisy, but all the younger men she knew had at one time or other been her lovers, or nearly been, and that seemed even less suitable—even though they would not have told and Clifford would not have known. She wanted her marriage to start without lies. Clifford didn’t seem to mind Uncle Phillip, strangely, just said it was useful to have someone in the car trade in the family, and set up a deal at once—a Mercedes for his MG, now he was about to be a married man. And when it came to it Helen was glad her Uncle Phillip was there—the guests being so weighted on the Wexford family and friend side, light on the Lallys’. Helen had friends enough, but like many very pretty girls, felt she got on better with men than women, and suffered a little, feeling women didn’t like her.

No one (who was anyone) except Clifford knew that Helen was more than three months pregnant on her wedding day—oh, and Angie of course, but she had not been sent an invitation and had returned to Johannesburg to lick her wounds. (Though Angie meant to have Clifford in the end and no amount of “I will’s” and “I do’s” to someone else would daunt her permanently.) It was a wonderful day in any number of ways. Sir Larry Patt came up to Clifford at the reception and said: