The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon Page A

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.

RESCUE!
    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