The Hearts and Lives of Men Read online

  But of course life is not so simple, even for Clifford, who, being fortunate enough to know very clearly what he wanted, usually got it. There were the gods of politesse and convention to placate first.

  “I hear you’re John Lally’s daughter,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

  “No,” she said. Reader, she did know. Of course she did. She was lying. She had seen Clifford Wexford’s photograph in the newspapers often enough. She had watched him on television—the hope of the British Art World, according to some, or a sorry symptom of its end, as others would have it. More, she had grown up with the sound of her father’s fulminations against Clifford Wexford, his employer and mentor, echoing through her home. (Some thought John Lally’s hatred of Clifford Wexford bordered on the paranoid: others said not, that the emotion, in the circumstances, was perfectly reasonable.) If Helen said “no,” it was because Clifford’s conceit annoyed her, even while his looks entranced her. She said “no” because, reader, I am afraid that lies came easily to her, when they suited her. She said “no” because she was ceasing to be scared and wanted to cause some frisson of emotion between him and her—his irritation, her annoyance—and because she was elated by his interest in her, and elation makes one rash. She did not say “no” out of any loyalty to her father—certainly not.

  “I’ll tell you all about who I am over dinner,” he said. And so great was the impression Helen made upon him that that was exactly what he did, in spite of the fact that he should have dined at the Savoy that evening and with Sir Larry Patt and Rowena his wife, and other important, influential and international guests.

  “Dinner!” she said, apparently astonished. “You and me?”

  “Unless you want to bypass dinner,” Clifford said, smiling with such charm and understanding that the implications were all but lost.

  “Dinner would be lovely,” said Helen, pretending she had indeed lost them. “Let me just tell my mother.”

  “Baby!” reproached Clifford.

  “I never upset my mother if I can help it,” said Helen. “Life is upsetting enough for her as it is.”

  And so Helen, all innocence—well, almost all innocence—crossed over to her mother Evelyn and addressed her by her Christian name. The Lallys were an artistic and bohemian family.

  “Evelyn,” she said. “You’ll never guess. Clifford Wexford’s asked me out to dinner.”

  “Don’t go,” said Evelyn, panicky. “Please don’t go! Supposing your father finds out!”

  “You’ll just have to lie,” said Helen.

  A lot of lying went on in the Lally home at Applecore Cottage in Gloucestershire. It had to. John Lally would fly into terrible tempers over small things, and the small things kept arising. His wife and daughter tried to keep him calm and happy, even if it meant misrepresenting the world and the events thereof.

  Evelyn blinked, which she did frequently, as if the world was on the whole too much for her. She was a good-looking woman—how otherwise would she have given birth to Helen?—but the years spent with John Lally had tired and somehow stunned her. Now she blinked because Clifford Wexford was not the fate she had intended for her young daughter, and besides, she knew Clifford was expected to attend a dinner at the Savoy, so what was he doing going out with her daughter? She was all too conscious of the Savoy dinner: John Lally having refused, on three separate occasions, to attend it if Clifford was going too, and had waited till the fourth time of asking to consent to go, leaving his wife no time at all to make the new dress she felt so special an occasion required. Dinner at the Savoy! As it was, she wore the blue ribbed cotton dress she had worn on special occasions over the last twelve years, and had to be content to look washed-out but pretty, and not in the least chic. And how she longed, just for once, to look chic.

  Helen took her mother’s blink for approval, as had been her custom since her earliest years. The blink meant nothing of the sort, of course. If anything, it was, like a suicide attempt, a plea for help, to be excused from making a decision which would bring down her husband’s wrath.

  “Clifford’s gone to get my coat,” Helen said. “I must go.”

  “Clifford Wexford,” said Evelyn, faintly. “Gone to get your coat—”

  And so, amazingly, Clifford had. Helen went after him, leaving her mother to face the music of wrath.

  Now Angie owned a white mink (what else?)—which earlier in the evening Clifford had gratifyingly admired—and in the cloakroom it hung next to and even touched Helen’s thin brown cloth coat. Clifford went straight to the latter, and drew it out by the scruff of its neck.

  “This is yours,” he said to Helen.

  “How did you know?”

  “Because you’re Cinderella,” he observed. “And this is a rag.”

  “I’ll have nothing said against my coat,” said Helen, firmly. “I like the fabric, and I like the texture. I prefer faded colors to bright ones. I wash it by hand in very hot water and I dry it in direct sunlight. It is exactly as I want it.”

  It was a speech Helen was accustomed to making. She made it to her mother at least once a week, because at least once a week Evelyn threatened to throw the coat away. Helen’s conviction impressed Clifford. Angie’s mink, stiff on its hanger, made from the skins of wretched dead animals, now seemed to him both gruesome and pretentious. And, looking at Helen, now wrapped rather than dressed, and enchanting—and remember this was in the days before the old, the faded, the shabby and generally messy became fashionable—he simply consented, and never again made any critical remark about the clothes Helen chose to wear, or not wear.

  For Helen knew what she was doing when it came to clothes and it was indeed Clifford’s talent, great talent, and I am not being sarcastic, to distinguish between the true and the false, the genuine and the fake, the powerful and the pretentious, and have the grace to acknowledge it. Which was why, though still so young, he was Larry Patt’s assistant and would presently fulfill his ambition to be Chairman of Leonardo’s. Telling the good from the bad is what the Art World (and we must call it that name for lack of a better) is all about, and a sizable chunk of the world’s resources is devoted to just this end. Nations which have no religion make do with Art: the imposition of not just order, but beauty and symmetry, upon chaos …

  GETTING TO KNOW YOU

  ENOUGH. CLIFFORD TOOK HELEN to dine at The Garden, a vaguely oriental restaurant fashionable in the sixties, situated just outside the old Covent Garden. Here apricots were served with lamb, pears with veal, and prunes with beef. Clifford, assuming Helen’s taste would be unformed, and her tongue sweet, thought she’d like it. She did, just a little.

  She ate her lamb and apricots with Clifford’s eyes upon her. She had little neat even teeth. He watched her intently.

  “How do you like the lamb?” he asked.

  His eyes were warm, because he so badly wanted her to give a good answer, and also cold, because he knew that tests must exist, inasmuch as love can so dreadfully destroy judgment, and may prove to be temporary.

  “I expect,” said Helen kindly, “it tastes really good in Nepal, or wherever the dish belongs.”

  It was an answer, he felt, that could not be bettered. It showed charity, discrimination and knowledge, all at once.

  “Clifford,” observed Helen, and she spoke so softly and mildly he had to bend over to hear, and there was a gold chain around her neck, and on it a little locket that rested on the blue whiteness of her skin and entranced him, “this is not an exam. This is you taking me out to dinner, and no one has to impress anyone.”

  He felt at a loss, and was not sure he liked it.

  “I should be at the Savoy with the bigwigs,” he said, to let her know what he had sacrificed on her account.

  “I don’t suppose my father will forgive me for this,” she said, to let him know the same of her. “You are not his favorite person. Though of course he can’t run my life,” she added. She was not, when it came to it, in the least frightened of her father: she got th
e best of him, as her mother got the worst. His rantings, these days, quite entertained her. Her mother took them seriously, and felt threatened and weakened as her husband fulminated against lying never-had-it-so-good governmental claims, and the folly of a misguided electorate, and the philistinism of the art-buying public, and so forth, and she felt dimly responsible for all of it.

  “When you said you didn’t know me, you were lying? Why?” Clifford asked, but Helen only laughed. Her pink-to-white dress glowed in the candlelight: she knew it would. At its worst under the harsh gallery lighting: at its best here. That was why she had worn it. Her nipples showed discreetly in an era when nipples never showed. She was not ashamed of her body. Why should she be? It was beautiful.

  “Don’t ever lie to me,” he said.

  “I won’t,” she said, but she lied, and knew she did.

  They went home presently to his place in Goodge Street: No. 5, Coffee Place. It was a narrow house, squashed between shops, but central, very central. He could walk to work. The rooms were white-painted, the contents plain and functional. Her father’s paintings were everywhere on the walls.

  “These will be worth a million or more in a few years,” he said. “Aren’t you proud?”

  “Why? Because they’ll be worth money one day, or because he is a good painter?” she asked. “And ‘proud’? That’s the wrong word. As well be proud of the sun or the moon.” She was her father’s daughter, Clifford decided, and he liked her the more for it. She argued with everything yet diminished nothing. Girls like Angie made themselves special by deriding and despising everything around them. But then, they had to.

  He showed her the bedroom, in the attic, beneath the eaves. The bed was a large square on the floor: foam rubber (new at the time). It was covered with a fur quilt. There were more Lallys here too. Scenes of satyrs embracing nymphs, and Medusas young Adonises. “Not my father’s happiest period.”

  Reader, I am sorry to say that that evening Clifford and Helen went to bed together, which in the mid-sixties was not altogether the usual thing to do. Courtship rituals were still observed, and delay considered not just decent but prudent too. If a girl gave in to a man too soon, would he not despise her? It was current wisdom that he would. Now it is true that the going to bed with a man at first sight, as it were, can and often does lead to the rejection of the woman who has given her all and yet been found wanting. It is hurtful and demoralizing. But all that has in fact happened, I do believe, is that the relationship has hurried through from beginning to end in a few hours, and not sauntered along through months or years, and the man, not the woman, is the first to know it.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says. But he doesn’t. Well, it’s over, isn’t it. But just sometimes, just sometimes the stars are right: the relationship holds, seals, lasts. And that was what happened between Clifford and Helen. It simply did not occur to Helen that Clifford might despise her if she said yes so promptly; it did not occur to Clifford to think worse of her because she did. The moon shone down through the attic windows; the fur quilt was both rough and silky beneath their naked bodies. Reader, that night was twenty-three years ago but neither Clifford nor Helen has ever forgotten it.

  CONSEQUENCES

  NOW. A GREAT STIR had been caused at the party by Clifford and Helen’s precipitous departure. It was as if the guests sensed the significance of the event, and understood that because of it the train of many lives would be disturbed. True, there were other remarkable encounters that night, to go down in the personal histories of the guests—partners were swapped, love declared, hate expressed, feuds begun and ended, blows exchanged, scandals started, jobs found, careers lost and even a baby conceived in the back of the cloakroom beneath Angie’s mink, but the Clifford and Helen thing was the most momentous event of all. It was a very good party. A few are; most aren’t. It’s as if just sometimes Fate itself gets word there’s a party and comes along. But these other events don’t concern us now. What does is that at the end of the evening Angie found herself without an escort. Poor Angie!

  “Where’s Clifford?” young Harry Blast, the TV arts commentator, was rash enough to ask her. I wish I could say he became more tactful with the years, but he didn’t.

  “He left,” said Angie, shortly.

  “Who with?”

  “A girl.”

  “Which girl?”

  “The one who was wearing some kind of nightdress,” said Angie. She thought Harry Blast would surely offer to escort her home, but he didn’t.

  “Oh, that one,” was all Harry said. He had a roundly innocent pink face, a fiendishly large nose, and a new degree from Oxford. “Can’t say I blame him.” (At which Angie vowed in her heart he wouldn’t get far in his career if there was anything she could do about it. In fact, as it happened, she couldn’t. Some people are just unstoppable; by virtue, I imagine, of their obtuseness. Only recently Harry Blast—his nose remodeled by cosmetic surgery—hosted a major TV program called “Art World Antics.”)

  Angie stalked off, and caught and tore her red satin bow on a door handle as she went, quite spoiling her exit. She then ripped off the bow altogether, tearing the fabric as she did so, thus ruining £121 worth of fabric and £33 worth of dressmaking (1965 prices) but what did Angie care? She had a personal allowance of £25,000 a year and that didn’t include her capital, stocks, bonds and so forth, not to mention her shares in Leonardo’s and her expectations on her father’s death. Six gold mines, workers included, just to play with! But what use was all this to Angie when all she wanted was Clifford? She saw her life as a tragedy and wondered who to blame. She bullied a doorman into opening up Sir Larry Patt’s prestigious office so that she could call her father in South Africa.

  And so it was that even Sam Wellbrook, on the other side of the world, found himself affected by Clifford and Helen’s behavior. The sound of his daughter’s weeping traveled under the seas and across the continent. (This was before the days of satellite communication; but a tear is a tear, even when distorted by the clumsy devices of outmoded telecommunications.)

  “You’ve ruined my life!” Angie wept. “No one wants me. Nobody loves me. Daddy, what’s the matter with me?”

  Sam Wellbrook sat under an evening sun in a lush subtropical garden; he was rich, he was powerful, he had women of every race and color to fill his bed. He thought he could be happy if only he didn’t have a daughter. Fatherhood can be a terrible thing, even for a millionaire.

  “Money can’t buy me love,” as the Beatles were singing, at the very time we speak of. They were only partly right. Men do seem able to buy it: women not. How unfair the world is!

  “It’s all your fault,” she went on, as he knew she would, before he could tell her what the matter with her was. That she was not loved because she was unlovable, and it was not he who’d made her unlovable; she’d just been born like that.

  “So what’s new,” he mourned, and Toby the black butler renewed his gin and tonic.

  “I’ll tell you what’s new,” snapped Angie, pulling herself together fast, as she always could when money was at stake. “Leonardo’s is going downhill fast and you and I must take our money out while we still can.”

  “Who’s upset you?”

  “This isn’t personal. It’s just that Sir Larry Patt’s an ancient old fool, and Clifford Wexford’s a phony who can’t tell a Boule from a Braque—”

  “A what?”

  “Just be quiet, Dad, and leave the art-schmartz bit to me. You’re a philistine and a provincial. The point is, they’ve wasted millions on this show. No one’s going to turn up to see a lot of souls frying in hell; Old Masters are out, Moderns are in. If Leonardo’s is going to keep going it’s got to move into contemporary art, but who around here’s got the guts or the judgment?”

  “Clifford Wexford,” replied Sam Wellbrook. Angie’s father had a good intelligence system. He didn’t invest his money unwisely.

  “You will do as I say,” his daughter yelled. “Do you want to rui
n yourself?”

  She did not worry about the cost of the call. It was Leonardo’s phone. She had no intention of paying. And there we will leave Angie for the moment, except to mention the fact that Angie refused to tip the coat-check girl on the grounds that her mink had been hung up badly and marks made on the shoulders. No one else could see the marks but Angie. She wasn’t just rich, she meant to stay rich.

  Sir Larry Patt was most put out by Clifford’s behavior; disconcerted to discover that his assistant was not present at the Savoy to help him wine and dine the VIPs from home and abroad.

  “Arrogant young pup,” said Sir Larry Patt to Mark Chivers, from the Arts Council. They had been to school together.

  “Looks like the write-ups are going to be good,” said Chivers, who had shrewd little gray eyes in a wrinkled prune face and a goatee of surprisingly energetic growth, “thanks as much to champagne cocktails as Hieronymus Bosch, so I suppose we have to forgive him. Clifford Wexford knows how to manage the new world. We don’t, Larry. We’re gentlemen. He’s not. We need him.”

  Larry Patt had the pink, cherubic face of a man who has struggled hard all his life for the public good, which fortunately had coincided with his own.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he sighed. “I wish you weren’t.”

  Lady Rowena Patt was disappointed too. She had looked forward to catching Clifford’s blue eyes over dinner, from time to time, with her own demure brown ones. Rowena was fifteen years younger than her husband and had an equally sweet expression, though a far less wrinkled face than he. Rowena had an M.A. in History of Art and wrote books on the changing structure of the Byzantine Dome and while Sir Larry thought she was safely working in the British Museum Library she was as often as not in bed with one of his colleagues. Sir Larry, like so many of his generation, thought that sex only happened at night, and had no fears for afternoons. Life is short, thought Lady Rowena, that dark, tiny, shrewd little thing with the hand-span waist, and Sir Larry sweet, but boring. She was not any more pleased than Angie to see Clifford go off with Helen. Her affair with Clifford was all of five years over, but never mind: no woman in her middle years likes to see a girl in her early twenties make so easy a conquest; it is surely unfair that youth and looks should seem to count more than wit, style, intelligence and experience. Let Clifford escort Angie wherever he wanted. There could be no other motive in his heart but money, thought Rowena—and who is there who does not understand the motivation of money?—but Helen, the frame-maker’s daughter! It was too bad. Rowena lifted her brown eyes to the stocky Herr Bouser, who knew more about Hieronymus Bosch than anyone else in the world—except for Clifford Wexford, now treading close on his heels—and said: