The Hearts and Lives of Men (3 page)

“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.

N
OW. 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 ruin 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:

“Herr Bouser, I hope you will be sitting next to me at dinner. I so look forward to finding out more about you!” and Herr Bouser’s wife, who overheard, was quite startled and not at all pleased either. I tell you, that was quite a party!

But it was John Lally, Helen’s father, who was most upset of all.

“Idiot, why didn’t you stop her?” he demanded of his wife. John Lally had a wen on the top of his head where his hair thinned, and he trusted no one. His fingers were short and stubby and he painted delicate and exquisite pictures of determinedly unpopular themes—St. Peter at the gates of Heaven (nobody ever buys St. Peters. Something to do with the jangling keys—the sense of being unexpectedly barred, as if by a headwaiter for turning up in the wrong clothes. Too late to go back and get it right!), wilting flowers, foxes with bleeding geese in their mouths; if there was a subject nobody wanted on their walls, John Lally would paint it. He was, Clifford Wexford knew, one of the best, if for the time being one of the most unsalable, painters in the country. Clifford bought Lallys, very cheaply, for his own collection, and in the meanwhile employed the struggling artist to make frames for such paintings as turned up at Leonardo’s frameless, and picked his brains wickedly and for free as to how best to mount exhibitions. (This latter is an art in itself, though seldom recognized.) For this, and other reasons to do with the nature and power of arts administrators in general and art dealers in particular (and who more particular than Clifford Wexford), John Lally loathed and despised, and against his will served, the man who had now wrapped a thin brown coat around his young daughter’s white shoulders, and abducted her.

Evelyn was affected, too. Indeed, as ever, she was the one who suffered most. She did not retort, as she should have, “Because our daughter is free, white and over twenty-one” or “Because she fancied him” or even “Why shouldn’t she?” No. Over the years she had grown to take John Lally’s view of what the world was like, and who within it was good or bad. She was in the habit, in fact—never a good one—of looking at the world through her husband’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” was all she said. But then she was in the habit of taking the blame for everything. She even apologized for the weather. “I’m sorry it’s raining,” she had been heard to say, to guests. This is what living with a genius can do to a woman. Evelyn is dead now. I do not think she lived her life to the full. She should have faced up to John Lally more often. He would have accepted it, and even been the happier for it. If men are like children, as some women say, it is certainly more true in this respect than others—that they are happier when obliged to behave, like the little guests at a birthday party, strictly run. Evelyn should have had more courage. She would have lived longer.

“So you should be sorry,” said John Lally, adding, “Bloody girl’s only done it to upset me,” and he too stomped off into the night, leaving his wife to make any number of embarrassing explanations, and go to the Savoy dinner unescorted. This was, John Lally felt, no more than his wife deserved, for having let him down so badly. He thought if only he had married a different woman, how much happier he would now be. John Lally started a new painting that night, of the Rape not of the Sabine Women, but by the Sabine Women. It was they who were falling upon helpless Roman soldiers. John Lally was not always as silly and unpleasant as this; on the contrary, he just went into what his wife called “moods” and this was one of them. He was upset by what he saw as his daughter’s disloyalty. Also, of course, he had been drinking a great deal of champagne. Well, alcohol is always seen as an excuse for bad behavior. I would like to be able to report that Evelyn made a hit that evening with, say, Adam Adam of the
Sunday Times,
but she did not. Her inner eye, as it were, turned so totally upon her husband, her emotions were so consumed by him, that she scarcely registered with the outside world as being a person in her own right at all. It is true that the only cure for one man is another man, but how is that man, in some circumstances, if the first eats up her heart and soul, ever to be found? Evelyn made her own way home. This is the fate of rather dowdy, quiet wives who find themselves alone at functions.