Free The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon

room. She was laughing and teasing, unimpressed by his bad moods, as she usually was in the first flush of their relationship—and he forgot he was angry. He thought Helen would make up for what his parents had never given him—a feeling of ease and closeness; of not talking behind his back, conspiring against him. When he and Helen had children he would make sure of a proper space for them, between the pair of them. Meanwhile, close together in their white-sheeted bed, in the master bedroom, Cynthia and Otto talked.
    “You should take more interest in him,” said Cynthia. “He feels your lack of interest.”
    “I wish he’d stop fidgeting. He’s always fidgeting,” said Otto, who moved slowly, serenely and powerfully through life.
    “He was born like that,” said Cynthia. So he had been, nine months to the day after his parents’ meeting, as if protesting the suddenness and strangeness of it all. His mother barely seventeen, wild cast-off daughter of a wealthy banking family; his father, already at twenty running his own small firm of builders. Otto had been up a ladder, replacing glass in a conservatory, and had looked down at Cynthia, looking up, and that had been that. Neither of them had expected the baby, nor the pursuing vengeance of Cynthia’s family, snatching contracts from under Otto’s nose, condemning them to poverty and a perpetual moving on. Nor would it have altered their behavior had they known. And no one expected the overwhelming vengeance of the German occupation, the deportation and murder of the Jews. Cynthia’s family made it to America, Cynthia and Otto went underground, joined the Resistance, Clifford handed from household to household the while, until all three were shipped to England, the better for Otto to function. The habit of secrecy was never lost for either of them; Cynthia’s love affairs were all to do with it; Otto knew it and put up with it. They were no insult to him, merely the addict’s passion for intrigue. He got his fixes with MI5: but where could she get hers?
    “I wish he’d find himself a more solid occupation,” said Otto. “A picture dealer! Art is not for profiteering.”
    “He had a hard childhood,” said Cynthia. “He feels the need to survive, and to survive he has to scheme. It is our example; it is what we did, you and I, and he watched us.”
    “But he is the child of peace,” said Otto. “And we were the children of war. Why is it that the products of peace are always so ignoble?”
    “Ignoble!”
    “He has no moral concern, no political principle; he is eaten up by self-interest.”
    “Oh dear,” said Cynthia, but she did not argue. “Well,” she said, “I hope this one makes him happy. Do you find her attractive?”
    “I see what he sees in her,” said Otto cautiously. “But she’ll lead him a dance.”
    “She’s soft and natural, not like me. She’ll make a good mother. I look forward to grandchildren. We may do better with the next generation.”
    “We’ve waited long enough,” said Otto.
    “I just hope he settles down.”
    “He’s too fidgety to settle down,” said Otto, serenely, and they both slept.
    Helen wept a little when she returned to Clifford’s home, Clifford’s bed.
    “What’s the matter?” he asked.
    “I just wish my parents were coming to my wedding,” she said, “that’s all.” But in her heart she was glad. Her father would only make some kind of scene; her mother turn up in the old blue ribbed cotton dress, her eyes red-rimmed from the previous night’s row. No. Better forget them. If only now she weren’t beginning to feel sick in the mornings. There still might well be reasons—the change in routine, the nights of wild love-making, the many dinners out—and she so accustomed to frugal student’s fare, or the pork, beans and cider-if-you’re-lucky routine of the Lally household—but it was beginning to seem unlikely. No quick pregnancy tests in those days, no vacuum abortions on the