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    The Hearts and Lives of Men: A Novel
    The Hearts and Lives of Men: A Novel
    The Hearts and Lives of Men: A Novel
    Ebook435 pages9 hours

    The Hearts and Lives of Men: A Novel

    By Fay Weldon

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    It’s 1960s London, and the sexual revolution is in full swing in Fay Weldon’s enduring story of lust, marriage, family, art, avarice, ambition, betrayal, and true love
    Clifford Wexford and Helen Lally meet at a party and fall passionately in love. But their baby, Nell, isn’t yet one when their marriage unravels. Divorce quickly follows on the heels of wedding bliss, and so begins a battle for Nell’s care and affection. Helen remarries; Clifford has affairs—and something quite remarkable happens to little Nell.                  Fay Weldon has written a sparkling gem of a novel, in which good triumphs over malice, and love can still conquer all. Part allegory, part adventure story, The Hearts and Lives of Men reveals the souls of both men and women.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 16, 2013
    ISBN9781480412507
    The Hearts and Lives of Men: A Novel
    Author

    Fay Weldon

    Fay Weldon is a novelist, screenwriter and cultural journalist. Her novels include ‘The Life and Loves of a She-Devil’, ‘Puffball’, ‘Big Women’ and ‘Rhode Island Blues’. She has also published her autobiography ‘Auto da Fay’. Her most recent novel was the critically acclaimed ‘She May Not Leave’. She lives in Dorset.

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    3.5/5

    38 ratings1 review

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    • 3/5
      It took me years to get around to reading this, and then when I did it took me years to finish. After about half of it, I left it alone for months; maybe it's because the fate of a baby and (later) a tiny tot don't interest me all that much. Nell became more interesting to me as she grew up.

      The ending of this book can hardly be considered a surprise; the suspense is in how and when Nell and her parents will find each other eventually.
      By the last third of the book I was finally in its grasp. It took a while but it did happen.

      The voice of the narrator is very direct, and usually friendly and wise; she tells us the story the way a kind aunt might. Still, she can be sharp, too.

      Not a great book, in my view. But well worth reading.

    Book preview

    The Hearts and Lives of Men - Fay Weldon

    The Hearts and Lives of Men

    Fay Weldon

    Contents

    Beginnings

    Getting to Know You

    Consequences

    Mornings After the Night Before

    Family Relations

    Looking Back

    A Knife in the Back

    Mother and Daughter

    Protective Custody

    Little Nell's Inheritance

    Going to Angie for Help

    Rescue!

    Leaping into the Future

    First Days

    A Time of Happiness

    A Tidal Wave of Trouble

    Lies, All Lies!

    The Prelude to Disaster

    Access!

    Tug of Love

    The Prelude to Disaster

    Getting Lost!

    Overdue!

    Kidnap!

    Living Properly and Well

    Puzzles

    No News Being Good News

    Back Home

    Thoughts from Abroad

    Just Supposing

    Conversations

    Revivals

    Fire

    Reparations

    Stirrings

    All Change!

    A Burnt-Out Trail

    Surprise! Surprise!

    Chickens Home to Roost!

    It Just So Happened—!

    Being Lovely

    That Night for the Rich!

    That Night for Nell

    Together Again

    Running Away

    Hot Pursuit!

    All Change!

    Triumph!

    A Sacrifice

    A Funeral

    Faraway Farm

    Bad Nights

    Patterns of Guilt

    Admiring Art

    Peace and Quiet

    Working Out the Past

    Two Interconnections

    Cause and Effect

    That Christmas

    The Return of Angie

    Property!

    Doing Better

    Stirring

    And Stir Again!

    A Truly Terrible Row

    Alone Again

    Great Expectations

    Married to Angie

    Child and Mother

    On Her Own

    Seeing Arthur

    Summer at the Kennels

    Talk of the Devil

    A New World

    Stirrings

    Ill-Wished

    Cure

    Disturbance

    Meeting Up!

    Loved

    Unloved!

    A Turn of Fortune

    Blowing the Gaff

    Helen and Clifford

    Reformation

    Forgiveness

    Drama

    About the Author

    BEGINNINGS

    READER, I AM GOING to tell you the story of Clifford, Helen and little Nell. Helen and Clifford wanted everything for Nell and wanted it so much and so badly their daughter was in great danger of ending up with nothing at all, not even life. If you want a great deal for yourself it is only natural to want the same for your children. Alas, the two are not necessarily compatible.

    Love at first sight—that old thing! Helen and Clifford looked at one another at a party back in the sixties; something quivered in the air between them, and, for good or bad, Nell began. Spirit made flesh, flesh of their flesh, love of their love—and fortunately, and no thanks to the pair of them, it was, in the end, for good. There! You know already this story is to have a happy ending. But it’s Christmastime. Why not?

    Back in the sixties! What a time that was! When everyone wanted everything, and thought they could have it, and what’s more had a right to it. Marriage, and freedom within it. Sex without babies. Revolution without poverty. Careers without selfishness. Art without effort. Knowledge without learning by rote. Dinner, in other words, and no dishes to clean up afterward. Why don’t we do it in the road? they cried. Why not?

    Ah, but they were good days! When the Beatles filled the airwaves and if you looked down you discovered you had a flowered plastic carrier bag in your hand and not a plain brown one, and that the shoes on your feet were suddenly green or pink, and not the brown or black your forebears had been wearing for centuries. When a girl took a pill in the morning to prepare her for whatever safe sexual adventures the day might bring, and a youth lit a cigarette without a thought of cancer, and took a girl to bed without fear of worse. When the cream flowed thick into boeuf en daube and no one had heard of a low-fat/low-protein diet, and no one dreamed of showing starving babies on TV, and you could have your cake and eat it too.

    Those years when the world lurched out of earnestness and into frivolity were fun indeed for Clifford and Helen, but not, when it came to it, for little Nell. Angels of gravity and resolution need to stand around the newborn’s crib, the more so if the latter happens to be draped in brilliant psychedelic satin, not sensible white, washable, ironable cotton. Actually, as it happened, I doubt the angels were around for the asking—they were off in other parts of the world: hovering shocked over Vietnam and Biafra or the Golan Heights—even if Clifford and Helen had remembered to send out the invitations, which they didn’t.

    People like Clifford and Helen love and create havoc in every decade in every century, in every corner of the globe, and the children of lovers, any place, any time, might just as well be orphans, for all the attention they get.

    The sixties! In the first half of the seventh decade of the twentieth century, that’s when Nell was born. At the party at Leonardo’s at which Clifford first saw Helen across a crowded room, and Nell began, caviar and smoked salmon were served.

    Leonardo’s, as you may know, is a firm rather like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. It buys and sells the world’s art treasures; it knows what is what and, when it comes to a Rembrandt or a Peter Blake, certainly how much; it can tell the difference between a chair by Chippendale and a chair by a disconcertingly skilled Florentine craftsman pretending he is Chippendale. But Leonardo’s, unlike Sotheby’s or Christie’s, also has its own large exhibition halls, where partly for its own pleasure and profit, and partly for the good of the public, it presents major art shows for which it receives, via the Arts Council, a fair whack of the nation’s art subsidy (some say too much, others not enough, but that’s the way these things go). If you know London you will know Leonardo’s well; that mini-Buckingham Palace of a building which stands on the corner of Grosvenor Square and Elliton Place. These days it has branches in all the major cities of the world; in the sixties, London Leonardo’s stood proud, important and alone, and this particular party was in honor of the opening of the first of its really major shows—an exhibition of the works of Hieronymus Bosch, gathered together from public and private collectors all over the world. The project had cost a terrifying amount and Sir Larry Patt, whose brilliant young assistant Clifford Wexford was, was nervous about its success.

    He need not have been. This was the sixties. Try anything new; it worked.

    Champagne cocktails were served, bouffant hairstyles worn (though a few beehives still rocked the chandeliers), as were amazingly short skirts; and very frilly shirts and long hair by the more avant-garde of the men. On the walls writhed the tormented figures of the artist’s vision—in hell, in copulation, the same thing—and beneath, the great, the famous, the talented and the beautiful rubbed shoulders. Gossip columnists took notes. Art schmart! It was a wonderful party, I can tell you. Taxpayers paid and no one queried the bill. I was there, with my first husband.

    Clifford was thirty-five when he met Helen, and he was already one of the great and famous, not to mention talented, beautiful and gossip-worthy. He had, he felt, just about worn out bachelorhood. He was looking for a wife. Or at any rate he felt the time had come in his career to start giving dinner parties and impress influential people. For that a man needs a wife. A butler might be chic but a wife spelled solidity. Yes, he needed a wife. He thought Angie the South African heiress might do. He was, in a desultory fashion, courting the poor girl. He walked into the party—his party, really—with Angie on his arm, and walked out with Helen. No way to behave!

    Helen was twenty-two when she met Clifford. Even now, in her mid-forties, she is stunning enough, and still quite capable of causing trouble in the hearts and lives of men. (Though I suppose and hope she has learned the value of abstaining from so doing.) But then! You should have seen her then.

    Who is she? Clifford asked Angie, looking at Helen across the crowded room. Poor Angie!

    Now Helen was far from being the perfect beauty of the sixties—which ran, as you may remember, to the round-faced doll-like, punctuated by smouldering Carmen eyes—but was nevertheless a size ten, five-foot-seven stunner, with a heap of thick brown curly hair, which she saw as mousey and her great misfortune in life and through the succeeding years was to bleach, tint and generally torment, before henna came on the market and solved her problems. Her eyes were bright and intelligent; she looked soft, tender, provocative and how-dare-you! all at once. She was her own woman. She didn’t try to please any more than Clifford did; she just pleased. She couldn’t help it. She never shouted at servants, or snapped at hairdressers—though at the time I speak of, of course, the opportunity had scarcely arisen. She was poor, and lived humbly, making do.

    That? said Angie. No one in particular, I shouldn’t think. Whoever she is, she has no dress sense.

    Helen was wearing a rather thin, rather plain, rather well-washed cotton dress halfway between pink and white, of a misty, fluid, sunlit fashion five years ahead of its time. Her breasts beneath the gentle fabric seemed bare, small and defenseless. She was long-backed, tapered and waisted, as the song has it, like a swan.

    As for Angie, the millionairess! Angie was wearing a stiff gold lame dress with a big red satin bow on the back, cut absurdly low over practically no bosom at all. She looked like a Christmas cracker with no present inside. Three successive dressmakers had wept over the dress, and all three had lost their jobs, but no amount of sacrifice could make the dress a success.

    Poor Angie! Angie loved Clifford. Angie’s father owned six gold mines, so she thought Clifford ought to love her in return. But what, when it came to it, did she have to offer except a sharp brain and five million dollars and her thirty-year-old, still-unmarried self? She had a dry little body and a dull skin (a good skin can make the plainest girl attractive but Angie did not have one; some inner light, I fear, was missing), and no mother, and a father who gave her everything she wanted, except affection; all of which made her greedy, and tactless, and petulant. And Angie knew these things about herself, and could do nothing about it. As for Clifford, he knew it would be practical to marry Angie, as had quite a number of men before him, and Clifford was a practical man; but he just somehow didn’t want to marry Angie, and neither had they. Those few who did propose—for there is no rich young woman totally without suitors—Angie despised and rejected. Anyone who can love me, Angie’s unconscious worked out, is not worth me loving. She was, as you can tell, in a strictly no-win emotional fix. Now she wanted Clifford, and the more he didn’t want her, the more she wanted him.

    Angie, said Clifford, "I need to know exactly who she is," and do you know that Angie actually went to find out? She should have slapped Clifford’s face, but then none of this story would have happened at all. Angie’s acquiescence to Clifford’s bad behavior was the little acorn from which the whole eventful oak tree grew. But there, the world is so full of should have’s and shouldn’t have’s, isn’t it? If only this, if only that! Where will it all end?

    I should perhaps describe Clifford to you. He is still around the London scene; you will see his photograph in Art World and Connoisseur from time to time, though sadly not as often as before, since age does, in the end, wear out drama and scandal. But the eye, more from the habit of decades than anything else, goes straight to his photograph, and what Clifford has to say about whither art? or whence post-surrealism? remains interesting though no longer exactly subversive. He is a tall, solid, blunt-nosed man with a strong jaw and a broad face, a frequent smile (ah, but is he smiling with you, or about you?) which lights up eyes as blue as Harold Wilson’s (and those eyes are very, very blue: I have seen them face to face: I know). Clifford has wide shoulders and narrow hips and thick straight hair so fair in those days it was almost white. He is still, though he must by now be approaching sixty, respectably enough thatched. His enemies (and he still has many) amuse themselves by saying he has a portrait of himself in his attic, which grows balder and fatter day by day. Clifford was, and still is, energetic, lively, entertaining, charming and ruthless. Of course Angie wanted to marry Clifford. Who wouldn’t?

    Now Clifford Wexford’s rise in the world was not so much meteoric—for surely meteors fall, rather than ascend?—but missilic, having all the force and energy of Polaris rising from the sea. Or let’s put it another way—Clifford Wexford buzzed around his boss, Sir Larry Patt, like a bee determined to get into the honey-pot. The Bosch exhibition had been Clifford’s brainchild. If it succeeded, Clifford would get the credit; if it failed, Leonardo’s and Sir Larry Patt would get the blame and carry the financial loss. That’s the way Clifford worked, then as now. He understood, as men of Sir Larry’s generation did not, the power of PR: that glamour and the buzz counted as much, if not more, than intrinsic worth: that money must be spent if money is to be earned—that it doesn’t matter how good a painting or a sculpture may be—if nobody knows it’s good, it might as well be bad. Clifford moved Leonardo’s out of the first half of the century into the second and hurled it brutally on its way into the next—he was the key to the success story that was to be Leonardo’s over the next twenty-five years, and Sir Larry realized it, on that opening night of the Bosch Exhibition, though he didn’t much like it.

    Angie made her way back to Clifford through the glittery, gossipy crowd as it downed its public-funded champagne cocktails (sugar lump, orange juice, champagne, brandy) beneath the hell-cursed figures of Bosch’s vision, and said, Her name’s Helen. Some frame-maker’s daughter.

    Angie hoped that would be the end of Helen. Frame-makers were surely the dogsbodies of the art world and hardly worth thinking about. Angie assumed that what would count with Clifford when it came to marriage was not so much a girl’s looks as her parentage and wealth. In this she wronged him. Clifford, like anyone else, wanted true love. He was actually trying quite hard to love Angie, but failing. He could not find her affectations and snobberies entertaining. He thought that being her husband would in too many respects be disagreeable. She would shout at the servants and be childishly bitchy about women he chose to admire, and make tedious scenes about this, that and the other.

    By ‘some frame-maker,’ said Clifford, I suppose you mean John Lally? The man’s a genius. I commissioned him to hang this whole exhibition. And poor Angie understood that once again she had betrayed her ignorance, and said the wrong thing. Frame-makers were, after all, to be admired and respected. It was part of Angie’s trouble in her dealings with Clifford that he was not consistent—at least in her terms—in what he admired and what he despised. Success, which Angie accorded only to the rich and/or beautiful and/or famous, Clifford would accord to all kinds of unlikely people—quite poor, even disabled poets, elderly writers with whiskery chins and shaky hands or lady artists in dreadful caftans—the kind of people whom Angie would never in a world of Saturday nights ask to dinner.

    "But what’s the point of them?" she’d ask.

    The future will reckon them, he’d reply, simply, if not the present. How did he know? But he seemed to.

    If Angie wanted to please Clifford, she had to think first, speak later. He was death to spontaneity. She knew it; yet she wanted him, for ever and ever, for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. That’s love! Poor Angie! She wasn’t nice, but we can pity her, as we can pity any woman in love with a man who doesn’t love her, but is deciding whether or not to marry her, and taking his time about it, and in the meantime making her jump through unkind hoops.

    Well, well, said Clifford. So she’s John Lally’s daughter! and to Angie’s upset and astonishment simply left her side and crossed to where Helen stood.

    John Lally didn’t see, which was just as well. He was sulking over by the wine bar, wild-eyed, wild-haired, his eyes deep-set and suspicious, his mouth made loose and over-mobile by rage and protest, and destined within the next twenty years to be the nation’s leading painter, though no one (except Clifford) knew it at the time.

    Helen raised her eyes to Clifford’s and found him staring at her. The color of his eyes seemed to intensify whenever he was animated, and what tended to animate him was pulling off some amazing deal—acquiring for Leonardo’s, say, a Tutankhamen mask or a long-lost panel of Elgin Marble. Now they were very blue indeed.

    How blue his eyes are, Helen thought. As if they were painted— and then somehow she just stopped thinking at all. She was frightened. She stood defenseless (or so it would seem) and alone amongst chattering, fashionable people, all rather older than she, who knew exactly what to think, feel and do for the best, as she did not; and perhaps when she looked up into the blue, blue eyes she saw her future and that was what frightened her.

    Or perhaps she saw Nell’s future. Love at first sight is a real enough thing. It happens, and between the unlikeliest people. My own view is that Clifford and Helen were bit-part players in Nell’s drama, not center-stage at all, as they of course (like all of us) believed they were. And I do, as I say, believe Nell came into being in that moment when Helen and Clifford just stood and looked at each other and Helen was scared and Clifford determined and both knew their fate. Which was to love and hate each other, until the end of their days. The later joining of flesh to flesh, however overwhelming an experience, was in its way immaterial. Nell came into existence through love: but the passage from the insubstantial into the substantial must needs take place casually in that dark, half conscious, half unconscious passage we know as sex, and all Helen and Clifford knew of this intended miracle, as they looked at each other, was that the sooner they were in bed and in each other’s arms the better. Well, so it is for the luckiest of us.

    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 the 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?

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