Darcy's Utopia A Novel - By Fay Weldon
Eleanor Darcy is interviewed by Hugo Vansitart
A: WELL NOW, YOU ask, what is this thing called love? To give you a simple answer—love is enough to make you believe in God. It is the evidence you need which proves the benign nature of the universe. Love heightens your perceptions: it makes the air you breathe beautiful. It lets you know you are alive. It makes the news on the radio irrelevant; it turns the television into flickers. Love places you in the very centre of the universe; the knowledge that in your lover’s eyes you replace God can only be gratifying. It makes you immortal: love, after all, being forever. It makes you vulnerable as a kitten in case you’re wrong, in case love is not forever. One booted kick from the real world, you fear, and splat will go the kitten’s head against the wall, and that’s you finished. Yet fate weaves its heady patterns all around, good luck attends you, nobody boots you. That’s what I mean by love.
In Darcy’s Utopia all men will believe in God and all men will be capable of love.
Q: By men, do you mean women too?
The journalist did his best to be cautious in his questions, friendly in his manner. Public interest in Darcian Monetarism remained lively, although Professor Darcy was now perforce silent, being in prison. Eleanor Darcy, his wife, seldom gave interviews. When she did they were expensive; moreover, she had a reputation for taking offence, throwing journalists quite out of the house. Hugo Vansitart did not want this to happen to him.
A: Of course. As in any legal document, the greater includes the lesser. He incorporates she. Well, that’s what love is all about.
Q: I am relieved to hear this, Mrs Darcy. I had feared that, having already banned money in this perfectly wonderful, perfectly nonexistent society you hold in your head, this Darcy’s Utopia of yours, you might ban love as well! But you won’t, will you?
A: Good heavens, no. The whole place will be riddled with it. Love will serve as our entertainment: it will have to, since there is to be no TV. I do not, by the way, see Darcy’s Utopia as a perfectly wonderful place. Let us say, simply, that it is a workable society, as ours, increasingly, is not. But I haven’t finished with love. Let me get on. Love flatters women more than it does men. It makes the hair shine and the eyes glow; it cures spots. The woman in love attracts: lovers come in shoals or not at all. The man in love is somehow denatured. He can repel even the woman loved. The smile on the face of the man in love, as he draws near, can disconcert: there can seem something unmanly in such devotion, yet behind that unmanliness is the Devilish intent—and I do not mean that the deed he, and indeed you, intend is Devilish, rather that the sense of his being helpless in the face of carnal desire, driven on by it, seems to come from the Devil, not God—God tending to the hesitant, the tentative, in his works, and that perhaps is why the smile can seem false, soppy and indulgent; but soon the face is too near for you to see the smile, and you and he are one, so who cares? These things flicker on the edge of consciousness, are easily pushed down.
Q: Aren’t you talking about yourself, Mrs Darcy?
Outside, above quiet streets, clouds parted and a ray of sunlight pierced the white net curtains to dapple Mrs Darcy’s lean and handsome face. How green her eyes were! She moved to be out of the light, towards him rather than away from him. He found himself pleased. He was taking notes, not liking to rely only upon tapes in so important an interview. His writing was a little shaky. Had his hand been trembling?
A: Yes. Of course. But what is true for me is probably true for you, and everyone else. Love gives folk a sense of singularity and a wonderful overflow of benevolence. Quite giddily one skips about. You must have found that?
Q: I’m sorry, no. But then I’m not a particularly giddy person. Shall we get back to the role of money in a perfect society?
A: Not giddy? What, never? Good Lord, we must see to that! Satan, of course, sometimes puts in a literal appearance, just as does the Virgin Mary. My first husband Bernard actually saw the Devil, flesh and blood, bones, horns and claws, hovering outside the window, and a second floor window at that, of one of those concrete blocks for student accommodation they have at polytechnics.
Q: Didn’t that give him a nasty turn?
When Hugo Vansitart asked this question he bounced a little. He and his subject sat on a shiny sofa, black shantung with great red roses splodged across it. The springs were broken. When she moved, he moved. It was disconcerting.
A: You are laughing at me. You must try not to. Really, the world is not as you think it is. If these interviews are to be successful, you must try and be more open, less rigid. Giddier, in fact. The Devil did indeed put in an appearance, and very horrible and frightening it was. Bernard was not even in love at the time. But he was between belief structures, and into the vacuum left by both the Catholic and Marxist faiths, had rushed what the Russians used to refer to as ‘metaphysical intoxication’—under which heading they would lock up the socially and politically excitable for their own sake and that of society. Thought bounced round the inside of poor Bernard’s head like a ball in a squash court. It made him guilty and therefore vulnerable. Reason and ridicule can get rid of faith: but the guilt and the fear of punishment associated with free thinking remain. Besides, a curse had been put on him. Certain people he had offended were trying to frighten him. It was not all that surprising that the Devil materialized in front of his eyes. Yes, indeed, to answer your question, he was not expecting it and it gave him a nasty turn.
He noticed that there were grease spots on the sofa. Smeared butter, Hugo thought, left by the children of this household, this hell-hole of suburban domesticity. Already he had jam on his cuff, gained somehow in the walk from front door to sofa. Surely it was possible for Eleanor Darcy to receive him somewhere more suitable. This was not even, it appeared, her own house. It belonged to the mother of the four small children who racketed behind the thin plywood door.
Q: Your views on love are of course interesting, but not quite pertinent to the series of articles I envisage writing. I wonder if by any chance your husband left any of his unpublished work in your care? If so, could I see it?
A: How you try to divide the world up into sections! It won’t work, Mr Vansitart. We must deal with God and the Devil, love and sex, before we get on to economics, party politics, big business, education, crime and the rest. We must establish a framework for our house before we start putting up planks, or they’ll only fall down again. I have not yet finished with love. Hyper-inflationary monetarism will come in due course.
Q: But love is the proper province of women’s magazines, Mrs Darcy, surely?
A: Do you think so? If you think that, you will most certainly have to have your male consciousness raised!
She laughed, but he understood that she was angry. Her face paled. She was beautiful. She enchanted him. He did not know what was happening, what was about to happen. Someone came in with coffee, in mugs. ‘Thank you, Brenda,’ said Eleanor. He sipped: the coffee was bad. It had been made from powder and with tepid water. Dislike of it returned him to his senses.
Q: I’m sorry. Won’t you please go on?
A: Better to be in love than to be loved, but a state more difficult to attain. If in the seesaw of affections balance is attained, when each loves the other equally yet still desperately, why then there is the presence of God, and paradise: only then what happens is that we start longing for the snake to arrive and create a diversion, because we know this intensity of experience cannot be sustained: because we are, when it comes to it, on earth: and if this pitch of experience continues too long life itself will be worn away. The body, however empowered, entranced, in its delightfully sweaty transports, cannot support for long the trust placed in it by God. These things are meant for heaven, not earth. Young lovers, understanding this, will sometimes take themselves off to heaven by means of suicide pacts to escape the growing past, as much as a diminishing future. What is the point, having discovered what life on earth is all about, of going on with it? This world is a stop-over on the way to heaven: those of us who are in love don’t need Mohammed or Jesus to tell us so, or lay down rules to get us there—we’re on our way and don’t mind hurrying up. Or we wouldn’t be so careless of our health and safety. Hi there, darling! we cry, stepping under a bus in our eagerness to embrace and be embraced. Hi there!
Failing death, we invoke the snake. How we long for the snake! Love is like herpes—
Q: Could you repeat that?
A: Love is like genital herpes: once it has infected you it’s there forever: it stands by, waiting, requiring only certain conditions to bring it out. Debilitation, for herpes. A surplus of energy, for love. Forgive me the analogy: I know it is distasteful. But, as you will see, appropriate.
She was, he thought, poised somewhere between the male and the female: a strong, androgynous, chiselled face. Green witch’s eyes. He wanted them to see him, not the journalist; when it came to it, he preferred her talking to him about love, not addressing him as if he were a political meeting. His body stirred, his hand stretched out. Carefully she replaced it, and went on talking.
Q: Perhaps we could continue this interview over dinner? I am supposed to be at a function but I could easily forgo it.
A: I think it would be better not. Let me continue. The tendency of everything in the universe is to even out, seek its own level, as water does: any gross imbalance of good and evil cannot, alas, last. God strikes down into the flat amorality of everyday existence; a bored and irritated power determined to make things Good; the Devil, likeways, elects to make things bad. Look at the way your hand moved just now, following the dictates of your heart, or more precisely, your lust. It is part of the curse placed upon my ex-husband Bernard by the brat Nerina and her cohorts that I arouse these feelings in men. Their power is fading now: so long as they don’t start dancing and prancing round their dead goats or whatever and stir the whole thing up again, all may yet be well. Teenagers are hell.
As for me, temporarily out of love, working on my blueprint for the future, and pleased enough to rest from my task for a while, and do this lengthy, all-but exclusive interview with you; let me tell you that, like Bernard, but unlike Julian my second husband, I am not immune to terror.
That is enough for today, Mr Vansitart. Foolish questions, patient answers. Though I daresay you see it the other way round. I must help my friend Brenda put her children to bed.
Valerie Jones is surprised by Joy
LOVE STRUCK LIKE A whirlwind. I was not expecting it. I did not want it. I, Valerie Jones, a married woman in a good job, with as contented a home life as could reasonably be expected, went in a very ordinary little black dress to a Media Awards Dinner, and was seated next to Hugo Vansitart. I was about to say ‘quite by chance’ but it was of course our destiny. He arrived late: too late for the prawn pate—lucky him, I said—but in time for the chicken. There was an instant rapport between us. My husband Lou had not come with me: he hates these affairs: the massing together, as he describes it, of the chattering classes. Or was it because he was in Stuttgart, or Stockholm, or somewhere, playing his violin? I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Nor was Hugo’s wife Stef with him. She was in Washington, interviewing the Pope. Or someone, somewhere. I just remember thinking that’s the wrong person in the wrong place, how odd. Would it have made a difference if Lou had been there, or Stef had been there? I don’t think so.
Of course I knew Hugo Vansitart by his by-line. He is one of our leading political journalists. When I saw his name on the place card I thought, Oh dear, he’ll be bored by me. He’s much too clever for me. I am features editor of a leading women’s magazine—a weekly. Aura. We’re intelligent enough, I hope, but naturally, considering our market, are more concerned with matters of human interest than anything particularly intellectual. I didn’t want Hugo Vansitart to hold my magazine against me: define me by my employers. I had not expected him to be so good-looking. I scarcely liked to look at his face, at first. He just sat down beside me, brooding, dark, vaguely squarish, decidedly male, filling an empty place which had made me feel uneasy. He was late, he said, because he’d done the first of a series of interviews with the Bride of Rasputin out in the suburbs somewhere beside a distant railway line. It had taken him forever to get back to the centre of things. ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘Eleanor Darcy! I’m to see her tomorrow. What a coincidence!’
He laid his hand on mine and said oh, dear, he thought he’d had an exclusive: the editor of the Independent wasn’t going to like this one bit: I said, well, everyone likes to be the only one, in newspapers as in life, but I didn’t think he should worry. We might overlap but we would not coincide. He was no doubt doing his pieces on the Bridport Scandal and the phenomena of Darcian Economics: I had been commissioned by my magazine to do a serialized biography of Eleanor Darcy herself. A kind of docudrama for the lay reader.
‘Did she approach the magazine, or the magazine approach her?’ was the first thing he asked.
‘She approached us.’
He did not ask me how much Aura was paying, though I knew he badly wanted to. I told him later, in bed. She had asked for a hundred thousand pounds: we were paying half that. Though an interest in Darcian Economics persisted, my editor’s opinion, when presented with the demand, was that the public had begun to shift its attention from Eleanor Darcy. Rasputin, Julian Darcy, was famous: the Bride of Rasputin, rightly or wrongly, notorious. Fame is worth twice as much as notoriety. She asked for a hundred thousand pounds, she got fifty thousand pounds. There seemed a kind of journalistic sense in this.
‘How do you find Mrs Darcy?’ I asked. ‘What kind of person is she?’
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘She talks a lot, not always about what one wants to know. Be sure to ask her about the Devil.’
‘Better,’ I said, ‘that she talks too much than too little. Easier to cut than to pad.’
He said he supposed so. He said how remarkable it was that we should be sitting together. Himself about to write the gospel of Julian Darcy according to Hugo Vansitart, myself the gospel of Eleanor Darcy according to Valerie Jones. Great trust had clearly been put in us. His forefinger moved over mine. It was strange. So sudden, so unlikely, and yet so right, so fitting. I sat there in my boring little black dress, rather too thin and flat-chested for fashion, too old for comfort—as thirty-nine is—my hair cut too short that very day, in a wrong-headed attempt at sleekness, and felt my whole being lurch out of one state into another. I was all confident spirit—no longer blemished flesh. Then I heard my name being called. I’d actually won Feature Writer of the Year, Women’s Media Division. I got to my feet, worked out my route to the top table—I had in no way expected this honour—looked back at Hugo, and we exchanged smiles—or rather committed some kind of Act of Complicity, in which he summonsed and I acquiesced. I had never done such a thing before.
‘All treats,’ Hugo said, when I returned with my metal statuette—no cheque, alas—‘all treats tonight. Would you like to hear my Eleanor Darcy tapes?’
I said I would and we went to a Holiday Inn together, one of the rather grand, central city ones, which are anonymous as well as luxurious, and hideously expensive, but the beds are huge and the bathrooms good. I listened to Eleanor Darcy’s tape and tried to concentrate upon it. ‘She should not be so insulting to women’s magazines,’ I remember saying. Then it was all extraordinary. Why me, I kept thinking, why me, this is so amazing, so out of character, this is not the way I live. One early boyfriend, one husband, now this: myself, surprised by joy.
In the morning he said, ‘What will they say at home?’
I said, ‘I don’t care. What about you?’
He said, ‘Neither do I. Shall we stay here? Live here? Together?’
I said, ‘Why not? It could hardly be more expensive than living at home.’
And we both knew I lied but who cared?
He said, ‘Without home to distract us we could both do our pieces on Eleanor Darcy without others complaining, without children demanding. My tapes will help you, your tapes will help me.’
I said, ‘We’ll distract each other.’
He said, ‘But only in a supportive kind of way. We’ll get the balance right. We’re both workaholics. We’ll fuse.’
They had good office services at the Holiday Inn. They even provided us with word processors, IBM compatible; one each, it being a double room. I went down the road to Marks & Spencer for clothes. Mostly just satin slips and wraps and so on—I didn’t see myself going out much. What for? I called my number. Lou had put the answerphone on. The children would have got themselves to school. They were competent enough. My main function in the home, I remarked to Hugo, was as Witness to the Life. I left a message to say I had left home.
I gave my new telephone number to Aura, and settled down to love Hugo and prepare to write the life and times of Eleanor Darcy. Hugo went home once to fetch a suitcase, and was back within the hour. We did not wish to lose a minute of each other’s bodies, each other’s company, if it could possibly be helped. We had each other, we had our work, we had room service—what more did we need? We were well and truly happy. I had never felt the emotion before: nor, he said, had he.
From Valerie Jones’ first interview with Eleanor Darcy
A: I WILL NOT overburden you with my views on Darcy’s Utopia, the multiracial, unicultural, secular society the world must aim for if it is to have any hope of a future. I know you will simply leave it all out when you come to write your history of my life. I know you are concerned with what you call the human-interest angle, how I came to be who and what and where I am. But I have been created by a society interacting with a self: you can’t have one without the other. You will hold me up to other women as an example, how to start life in a back street as Apricot Smith, an untidy, misbegotten child; be promoted to Ellen Parkin, working wife of the ordinary down-at-heel hate-the-government kind; and to become the true love and wife of Professor Julian Darcy, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bridport.
You don’t care that Darcian Monetarism and the Bridport Scandal changed the thinking of nations: you just want to know how it was that in three decades God and the Devil between them managed to promote me from Apricot to Eleanor, by way of Ellen. And yes, it was promotion. As Eleanor Darcy I can go anywhere: it’s like a little black frock: you can dress it up with diamonds, dress it down with a cotton scarf: it always looks right. As Ellen Parkin I was only fit to run down to the corner shop in my slippers, or queue up for family benefit. And who would be interested in Parkin’s Utopia? Darcy’s Utopia has a much more convincing ring. Parkin smacks of small back streets and long-term illness—what’s left when the Devil has flown, sucking love out of you as he goes, leaving a burned-out patch behind. Names are magic, believe me. Better to be out of love as Eleanor Darcy than Ellen Parkin. The Ellen Parkins of the world love only once, and if it goes wrong give up.
Q: But you don’t change your nature by changing your name, surely?
A: Oh yes, you do. My advice to everyone is to change their name at once if they’re the least unhappy with their lives. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will choose a new name at seven, at eleven, at sixteen and at twenty-four. And naturally women at forty-five, or when the last child has grown up and left home, whichever is the earliest, will rename themselves. Then life will be seen to start over, not finish. It is a perfectly legal thing to do, even in this current fearful and unkind society of ours; no deed poll is required. So long as there is no intent to defraud, anyone can call themselves anything at all. But so many of us, either feeling our identities to be fragile, or out of misplaced loyalty to our parents, feel we must stick with the names we start out with. The given name is a dead giveaway of our parents’ ambition for us—whether to diminish or enhance, ignore us as much as possible or control us forever—and the family name betrays our social origins. No, it will not do. It will have to change.
Q: I see. You spoke earlier of the Devil. Our readers are not so domestic as you suppose—any article on Good and Evil enjoys high readership figures. Do you believe in the Devil?
A: Of course. It’s unsafe not to. And what a grand creature the Devil is in himself! How he sucks energy even from where he stands! He is all temporary fire and sparks, terror and drama, whisked up out of nowhere: but when he flies off you see the real damage that has been done: something permanently denatured, altogether seedy and totally ignoble. To believe in God is to believe in the Devil. It is quite an insult to God to deny the Devil’s existence.
In Darcy’s Utopia, men will believe in the Devil in the sense that they will be sensitive to the forces working away within even the best planned of their social structures, bent on their destruction. As it is with people, so it is with these social structures—by which I mean the government, the church, the civil service, educational and caring organizations, lobbies, societies for this and that, quangos and so forth and so on. Wherever, in fact, people are gathered together in the interests of the better and more humane organization of society, there the Devil lurks. The greater the striving for good, the nearer the approach to it, alas, the harder and sharper the fall. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the more extreme and present the good appears, the more pressing the danger that it will be promptly overthrown. Oh yes, in Darcy’s Utopia we will be on our guard. We will be vigilant and, what’s more, will understand what we must be vigilant about. We will not hide behind abstract terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘justice’, ‘dignity’. We will have lesser words, with more meaning.
Q: Talking about words, Mrs Darcy, what a pretty and unusual name Apricot is. How did you come by that? Was your mother particularly fond of fruit?
A: There was not much fruit about when I was a child. Sometimes we had sliced peaches for afters. So far as I’m aware, my mother named me after her brushed nylon nightie.
Q: You have a very soft voice. The tape recorder may not be picking up everything you say. I wouldn’t want to lose a word of it. Can you speak more closely into the mike? Her brushed nylon nightie, did you say?
A: That is what I said. There are a number of press cuttings which will help you as to the detail of my early life and times, and here in this folder are a few brief autobiographical sketches I happen to have written over the years. I hope you can read my writing. Do what you can with the material you have, and come back to me with any questions, or just for a chat. I have been rather out of circulation lately, preparing my magnum opus for publication. It’s good to be back in the world again.
Q: A magnum opus?
A: A blueprint for Darcy’s Utopia.
Q: You’ve found time for that as well?
A: As well as what?
Q: The court case must have taken up quite a lot of nervous energy.
A: My husband was on trial, not I.
Q: But Darcy’s Utopia is a kind of memorial to your husband?
A: He is not dead, Miss Jones, merely in prison. I am sure he would argue very strongly against many of my proposals, were he around to do so. I have borrowed his name because I like it, for no other reason. Besides, it is my name as much as his. After all, we are married.
Q: Of course. I’m sorry.
A: I think it is time to draw this interview to a close. We are going out for a healthy walk. I hear Brenda putting on the children’s wellies, against their wishes. Children do so like to go barefooted in the rain. Do you have children, Mrs Jones?
Q: I have two.
A: Lucky old you. I have none. Will you show yourself out? I have been sitting on my leg, and it’s gone to sleep.
Valerie gets one or two things wrong
I AM NOT USUALLY nervous about my work. Compared to home, in fact, work is a piece of cake. Many women report the same thing. It is easier to please an employer than a family: a liberation to have a job description, a joy to be free of the burden of peace-keeping. Mediating in the home is like trying to knead a piece of dough the size of a house: get it down here and it surges up there. Compared to all this employment is a piece of cake, yes indeed: or rather a nice firm crisp yeastless biscuit. And I take the view that those who employ me must take some of the blame when things go wrong. I am what I am—I do what I can. If I can’t, more fool them for asking me in the first place. And because I am not anxious, I do well. Me, Valerie Jones, Features Writer of the Year! The pleasure which suffuses out from between my agreeably bruised and battered loins is, when I can get round to defining it, the more intense for this unexpected infusion of worldly accomplishment. Valerie Jones, a success!
The trouble is I have committed myself, through my editor, to writing the life of Eleanor Darcy. I can’t take on the extra freelance commissions which will now come my way. On the very afternoon of the Media Awards Dinner I signed a contract with Aura undertaking to work exclusively on the project until delivery of the ms. Well, I will just have to work hard and get it done quickly. Fortunately, sex with Hugo takes up less time than, to be blunt, not-enough-sex with Lou. There is no time wasted teacup washing, dinner-party chatting, tense family-outering—the things we all do to pretend to ourselves and the world that there is more to marriage than sex. I can simply get into bed with Hugo and out of it to get on with Lover at the Gate, as Eleanor Darcy wishes the work to be called. I should feel guilt, remorse, doubt, distress, despair and so forth: I don’t. I should be in some kind of shock, but I am not. I should be debating the wisdom of my actions; I do not. I do not look into the future beyond the delivery of the manuscript. Why should I? Let the coins fall as they will: in due course it will become apparent whether they were heads or tails.
So if I get one or two things wrong in my account of Eleanor Darcy’s life, I tell myself, it will be her responsibility as much as mine. She chose Aura, Aura chose me. I repeat—I am what I am, I do what I can. Mrs Darcy does not make matters easier than she can help. I have the feeling she does not like me very much. She threw a few grains of fact at me during the course of the interview, as if she were scattering crumbs for a hopping sparrow. If I were working for the New Statesman or the Economist I would obviously have more interest in Darcy’s Utopia. I have in fact written pieces for both these publications. Because I am currently working for Aura does not mean I’m an idiot. I just need to know why her mother called her Apricot, and time is short, because both interviewer and interviewee get tired, and besides, I wanted to get home to Hugo.
Nor did she make things easy for me. Her voice is soft and low and she kept moving out of recording range. She once even said, ‘If it’s not on the tape, just make it up: it will be more interesting to your readers,’ which I thought rather insulting to me: certainly it made me feel diminished in my profession. Journalists are trained to report accurately what they are told, and to come to honest rather than convenient conclusions. We are, as Eleanor made me realize, alarmingly dependent on the veracity of our informants: we come to expect lies or half-lies in some few areas—age, or income, and those in public life will often fail to reveal their true opinions in their attempt to present an acceptable face to the world—but outside these areas the natural inclination of most folk is to speak the truth if they possibly can. They don’t speak of themselves and the world as if it were some kind of fictional creation which can be rewritten and subedited at will, as if one version of it were as valid as another. They do not normally pull visions of the Devil, as Mrs Darcy did in her interview with Hugo, out of a hat, to divert and deflect: they do not insist on fusing truth with Utopian notions, especially when they have the nerve to charge fifty thousand pounds for the privilege. I daresay Eleanor Darcy thinks money grows out of everyone’s ears. It might, for Aura, if she were more inclined to talk about the ordinary things of life, such as what she gives her friends for Christmas or what she reads on holiday.
Another thing: Eleanor Darcy is not a still person, a quiet person, as I am, or try to be. During our interview she quite frankly wriggled. First one leg over the other, then the other over the one: torso first this way then that, sometimes slouching; only once, when talking about her period as Bride of Rasputin, Vice Chancellor’s wife at Bridport, did she sit in what I would describe as an ordinary, decorous and ladylike fashion. Although the room was not particularly warm, she wore only a white T-shirt—well, whitish: like so many others nowadays no doubt she uses a phosphate-free environment-friendly washing powder- and jeans. Energetic people, those whose minds and bodies are active, seem, if not to notice the cold, at least to rather enjoy being so. To go about without the vest, without the wellies, without the coat, is to some people as smoking is to others, a celebration of freedom, of coming of age, of an escape from parental control. ‘You can’t go out like that,’ says the mother, ‘it’s freezing!’ And the rest of life is spent without a coat.
Eleanor Darcy said she was thirty: I would give her thirty-four or five. She is good-looking enough but not stunningly beautiful: I am always surprised at the plainness of women for whom men develop irrational and obsessive passions, as Julian Darcy clearly had for Eleanor. How else to explain the events leading up to the Bridport Scandal? Napoleon’s Josephine was a little, spotty thing: Nelson’s Lady Hamilton a fat and blowsy piece. Eleanor Darcy is intelligent, of course, and intelligence in a woman does turn some men on, though not many. Hugo, thank God, is one of the few.
Intelligence, I have always thought, makes it difficult for a woman to wear make-up: perhaps it’s as simple a matter as the mobility of a face making the stuff sink in, vanish, fail to remain the smoothing mask it’s meant to be. Eleanor Darcy’s skin was patchy: she was using too dark a shade of foundation cream. She had smudged a little grey eye shadow around the eye area and lip-lined her mouth rather crudely, failing to fill in with actual colour as most people do: her brown hair frizzed out round her head in a rather uneven halo. I don’t think it had been permed, merely squidged and scrunched as it dried. By and large she seemed disinclined to pay her appearance much attention, as if there were other far more urgent things to attend to. The mothers of small children often look like this, as we know, but Eleanor didn’t even have this excuse. Her legs were muscular—the jeans were tight: perhaps she had put on weight recently—and she had a strong neck and a firm chin, a shiny nose and bright rather deep-set eyes. People’s appearances, of course, add up to more than the sum of their features. A kind of overall impression is delivered, which is sometimes belied by actual detail and is more, I suppose, to do with confidence than anything else. The fact is that Eleanor Darcy looked and acted as if she were Queen of the World, as if to be the one to bring down a government was all in the day’s work and she was now turning her attention to the future. I tried not to resent it. I tried to like her, not to be awed by her: to match the power of her vigorous mind with the centring energy I felt in me, by virtue of the fact that Hugo loved me. I did not, as it were, go empty handed into that bargaining chamber, and I was grateful for it.
She spoke, as I would have expected, in mid-English: a kind of neutral middle-classedness which blurred her origins: the kind used by lady news presenters on networked TV. But listen carefully, and occasionally the sloppy vowels of the suburbs would seep through to betray her origins: and even the slight nasal whine of the rather more underprivileged. The child’s experience of life comes through in the adult’s use of language—whether the desire to escape the original background altogether, or to camouflage, defiantly to accept, or, by denying, to get out into the world and get on. Eleanor Darcy, I had no doubt of it, had been a brave and ambitious child.
She was at home, yet not at home, in her friend Brenda’s house. Brenda is a former school friend, who has so definite a ‘no comment’ policy as to be of very little help to Aura’s readership. She is the mother of four children under seven, and I think in the circumstances remarkably loyal to Eleanor, who lounges around her living room, sprawling, filling up time and space, talking about subjects way above Brenda’s head, though Brenda told me, as I left—as well as she could for trying to get on the children’s boots—that in fact she ran the local branch of the Labour Party and was active in environmental matters. It is always a mistake to suppose people to be ordinary, just because they have four children under seven and a low income. Almost no one is ordinary. Dig a little into ‘ordinary’ lives and you find passion, desperation, amazing acts of self-sacrifice and self-control and often powerful religious belief. It is only when the ordinary are suddenly elevated to the ranks of the un-ordinary that both their virtues and their eccentricities become apparent. Brenda, nevertheless, does still seem rather stubbornly ordinary, as does her house, a new semidetached on a slip road in an outer suburb. It has the virtuous shabbiness of the home of a good mother of four, whose husband is a mini-cab driver—that is to say is doing the best he can while getting his act together. Brenda brought us, without complaint or comment, many cups of caffeine-free instant coffee during the course of the interview. I can scarcely even remember what she looks like, except that her skirt was too tight and her stomach bulged, as stomachs do when you have had four children in a short time and are too unselfish to take the time to exercise. Her taste in slip covers for her three-piece suite was not good. Red roses on shiny black fabric is out of place in a humble suburban house, when the carpet is rough, serviceable hessian and toys pile up in the corners of rooms, and not even the most dedicated can find the time or energy to move them: if indeed there is anywhere to move them to. Hugo complained that the sofa was greasy and he got jam on his cuff. I did not think he would give much column space to Brenda. Readers do not pay to read about the likes of themselves.
But I may be wrong. One interview with Eleanor Darcy, some nights with Hugo, and I can already see I may be wrong about many things. My mind may, creaking and protesting, have to go into some new gear, as my body has already done, leading the way. I had always assumed that journalists—all professional people, in fact—should keep their work life and their love life apart, were they young and foolish enough to have the latter. I was wrong. I could see lust quite remarkably sharpening the edge of my writing. I had been married to Lou for fifteen years; our children, Sophie and Ben, were now thirteen and twelve. We had led a peaceful organized and unpassionate family life. If I had never been tempted to mix my professional and my personal life, it was because the opportunity to do so, alas, had not arisen. I had seen myself, as I had Lou, as the kind of person who has just about enough sexual energy when young to get it together with a member of the opposite sex and start a family and then leave all that kind of thing to others. I was wrong. All I had done was lower my sights, in the interests of respectability, moderation and a quiet life, and presented myself to the world as someone altogether ladylike, altogether a-sexual. It had worked so far and no further. I had been seated next to Hugo at dinner. Love had struck like lightning, leapt with the whirlwind; I loved, I worked, I thought, I felt, and there was no separating any of them out, or wanting to. Thus prepared, I will insert a new computer disc and begin Lover at the Gate.