Read Online The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon - Free Book Online Page B

Clifford, “one day. If I have anything to do with it.”
    “Darling,” said Cynthia, “painters are great because they have a great talent, not because you or Leonardo’s make them so. You are not God.”
    Clifford just raised his eyebrows and said, “No? I mean to run Leonardo’s, and in the Art World that makes me God.”
    “Well,” said Cynthia, “I can’t help feeling someone like Angie Wellbrook, with a couple of gold mines behind her—”
    “Six—” said Clifford.
    “—would have been a less, shall we say, surprising choice. Not that your Helen isn’t very sweet.”
    It was agreed they were to be married on Midsummer’s Day, in the village church (Norman, plus lych-gate) and have the reception in a big tent on the lawn, for all the world as if the Wexfords were landed gentry.
    Which of course they were not. Otto Wexford, builder, had fled with his Jewish wife Cynthia from Denmark to London in 1941, with their young son. By the end of the war—which Cynthia spent in a munitions factory, wearing a headscarf, and Clifford running wild as an evacuee in Somerset—Otto was a Major in the Intelligence Forces and a man with many influential friends. Whether or not he actually left the Secret Service was never made clear to his family but, be that as it may, he had risen briskly through the world of postwar finance and property development, and was now a man of wealth, power and discernment, and kept a Rolls Royce as well as horses in the stables of his Georgian country house, and his wife rode to hounds and had affairs with the neighboring gentry. All the same, they never quite “belonged.” Perhaps it was just that their eyes were too bright, they were too lively, they read novels, they said surprising things. Come to tea and you might find the stable-hand sitting in the drawing-room, chatting, as bold as brass. No one refused the wedding invitation, all the same. The Wexfords were liked, though cautiously; young Clifford Wexford was already a name: too flashy for his own good but entertaining, and the champagne would be plentiful, and the food good, though un-English.
    “Mother,” said Clifford to Cynthia, on the Sunday morning, “what does Father say about my marrying Helen?” For Otto had said very little at all. Clifford waited for approval or disapproval, but none came. Otto was friendly, courteous and concerned, but as if Clifford was the child of close friends, rather than his one and only son.
    “Why should he say anything? You’re old enough to know your own mind.”
    “Does he find her attractive?” It was the wrong question. He was not sure why he asked it. Only with his father was Clifford so much at a loss.
    “Darling, I am the wrong person to ask,” was all she replied, and he felt he had offended her as well. Though she was cheerful and flighty and charming enough all day, heaven knows. Otto went hunting, and Cynthia made a point of staying home, to be nice to Helen.
    “This house is like a backdrop for the stage,” Clifford complained to Helen on Sunday night. They were not leaving until Monday morning. They had been put in separate bedrooms, but on the same corridor, so naturally, and as was expected, Clifford had made his way to Helen’s room.
    “It isn’t real. It isn’t home. It is a cover. You know my father’s a spy?”
    “So you’ve told me.” But Helen found it hard to believe.
    “Well, what do you make of him? Do you find him attractive?”
    “He’s your father. I don’t think of him like that. He’s old.”
    “Very well then. Does he find you attractive?”
    “How would I know?”
    “Women always know things like that.”
    “No they don’t.”
    They quarreled about it, and Clifford returned to his own room, without making love to her. He did not, in any case, like his mother’s expectation that he would—by putting them in separate rooms, but near. He felt insulted by her, and irritated by Helen.
    But early in the morning Helen crept into his