Valerie speaks to Belinda
NOW HUGO AND I had been having a small ongoing indifference of opinion. He wanted to read Lover at the Gate—I’d said no, not until I’d finished it, polished it, was happy with it. The real reason was rather different—firstly, the piece seemed intensely private: secondly, he might decide I’d got everything wrong. And of course it was a severely fictionalized piece of work—it had to be; Eleanor provided so few clues, and in such a roundabout way. Yet I believed, I believed, I had got her right, and I didn’t want Hugo puncturing the balloon of my belief.
At least I knew that Hugo was so honourable that he wasn’t going to read the manuscript against my wishes. He was a better person than I was; he didn’t steam open other people’s mail and then burn it. Valerie-with-Lou would never have done such a thing. Valerie-with-Hugo seemed capable of anything. I wondered why I didn’t worry about our steadily mounting hotel bill. Was I not the kind of person who worried about such things? Lou had put a stop on our joint account—when you look into the finances of a marriage it is astonishing how little a trusting wife can claim as her own, should that marriage disintegrate (another piece for Aura? I might even write it myself) but even this did not perturb me. If I thought about it, it seemed unlikely that Hugo could pay it. Stef had used his and her bank account to pay off the mortgage on their house, and there was nothing in it at all. And he had told me his Amex card had been withdrawn after some mix-up with his last payment.
We remained suspended, Hugo and myself, here in the Holiday Inn, bound in servitude to Eleanor Darcy by virtue of the words we fed into our computers. Neither of us wanted to break the spell. Neither of us wanted to be reclaimed by the real world.
The fact was that I was becoming more and more institutionalized in the Holiday Inn. The outside world seemed noisy, and dangerous, and difficult to decipher. Inside everything was safe and cosy. In ‘Hotel Services—A Guide’ was everything necessary to sustain a peaceful and comfortable life, from Church Services (dial 5 for Concierge) to Ironing Board (dial 3 for Housekeeper). I had to get a colleague to go down to St Katherine’s House and check the marriage and divorce records. And yes, I was right, there was no record of a divorce between Ellen and Bernard Parkin, and Eleanor Parkin and Julian Darcy had certainly gone through a marriage ceremony. Also, Bernard Parkin had recently married Gillian Gott in a religious ceremony. Both were bigamists! I was tempted to call one of the gutter newspapers and raise the money to pay the hotel bill, but refrained. A large sum for me, a small agreeable snippet of news for them, could disrupt lives most unpleasantly though I could see that Julian Darcy, in prison, might have found it welcome information. Also, it’s always useful in the media world to have something secret up your sleeve. You never know.
The operator put through a call from Belinda Edgar, who wanted to see me. She was a friend of Apricot’s; she’d heard I was writing a book about her. She thought she might be of help.
‘So long as you come here,’ I found myself saying, ‘and I don’t have to go out, that’s fine by me.’
She said she would. She asked if she’d be able to see what I’d written and, although I was nervous, I said yes she could. She sounded a bright, positive, friendly person, and so she turned out to be. An initial impression given by a voice on the telephone is usually the right one.
She came—pale-skinned, small-eyed, rounded, exuberant—and skimmed through the manuscript. She worked, she said, part-time as a publisher’s reader. She lived a pleasant life: she and her husband had two small children and, unlike Brenda, she had help in the house. It’s a sorry fact that a woman’s fortune so often depends upon the man she marries.
‘Well,’ said Belinda, when she finished reading—I tried to appear indifferent, not to pace up and down—‘you’ve got a lot of it right. I hadn’t realized that Apricot’s marriage to Julian was bigamous. Poor Julian: I went to visit him in prison once, but I don’t think he was pleased to see me. He remembered me as one of the waitresses the year we helped Apricot out when she catered for Graduation Week. He couldn’t think why he was being visited by a waitress. He always was a terrible snob. Liese got asked to dinner because Leonard shoots grouse with the best people, even though it’s only because they want a cheap car, but Frank and me never qualified. Too arty. Even in an open prison he manages to be hopelessly urbane. They all hate him. But he was right about a-monetarism. There’s quite a group of us believe in it, you know. The only way to move society out of its present predicament, the dead end of the surplus society, is to devalue money itself.’
‘You must talk to my friend Hugo Vansitart about that,’ I said. ‘I’d very much appreciate your views on the supernatural. Was there, in your opinion, any sort of curse on Bernard?’
‘You mean other than just being married to Apricot?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Of course not,’ said Belinda. ‘The media communications course set off a kind of mass hysteria, that’s all.’
‘Brenda seems to think there was. Is.’
‘Oh, Brenda!’ said Belinda. ‘She’s got four children under seven. You can’t expect sense from her. It was all simple cause and effect; Apricot left Bernard and he went to pieces. He was already halfway there. The economy went to pieces when the cash dispensers started pouring out money; but on Sundays only, thus spoiling the whole idea. It had already more or less collapsed. Of course there was resistance. No one was properly prepared. People panicked: They saw the differential going between rich and poor: they didn’t understand what was happening. They can understand Communism and they can understand Capitalism, but that’s all. That the West should try and adopt the Soviet non-money economy, just as the Soviets try to take Capitalism on board, blew their minds. People like polarities—Apricot’s always saying that. Had Julian and Apricot simply wanted to switch them, that would have worked; people would have accepted it. But in the end the courage to see it through wasn’t there.’
‘In other words, the Devil got into the works and spoiled everything,’ I said.
‘So long as you’re talking metaphorically,’ said Belinda. ‘So long as you don’t get any idea into your head that there’s some power out there talking through Eleanor Darcy’s mouth, at any rate one which knows what it’s talking about.’
‘Well,’ I said comfortingly, ‘Hugo is dealing with the political and economic background. I’m more concerned with the human angle.’ I had the feeling she didn’t like me very much. But the mistress is always an offence to the married woman. ‘You feel I’ve got her more or less correct?’
‘You’ve got Apricot’s life the way she would have wanted it to be, let’s say that. Well, thank you. I’ve made up my mind. I’ve thought for a long time I might write something about Apricot, now I’m pretty sure I will. You do the gospel according to St Valerie, I’ll do the gospel according to St Belinda.’
And I realized I hadn’t been milking her for information, she had been milking me, and I, like a fool, had let her read my manuscript. And I also thought, serve me right. Since holing up in this Holiday Inn I hadn’t been a nice person at all. I’m sure when I lived at home I was a better person all round.
As soon as my hand had stopped trembling I set to work again. There is nothing like work for putting an end to unhealthy introspection.
LOVER AT THE GATE [11]
Eleanor goes to visit Jed and Prune
ELEANOR WENT TO VISIT Jed and Prune. She found poor Prune in tears, but that didn’t surprise her. Prune had miscarried another baby, at three months. It was clear to Eleanor that she intended creeping about her kitchen for the rest of her life, trying to bind her errant husband to her by having babies she was not fit to have.
‘Oh, Ellen,’ said Prune, ‘you’re so famous now I hardly know what to say to you.’
‘You never did,’ said Eleanor, brutally. Poor Prune always made her feel brutal. ‘And to be Rasputin’s wife hardly counts as fame.’
‘I don’t know why you don’t just do a nude centrefold and have done with it,’ said Prune. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me about me? Don’t you care? I’m so unhappy. I am a failure. Three miscarriages and a stillbirth.’
She was peeling onions and seemed in no hurry to stop.
‘If you didn’t keep rubbing your eyes, and pressing more and more onion juice into your eyeballs,’ said Eleanor, ‘I expect you would soon feel better. What are you making? Stew?’
‘Steak and onion pie,’ said Prune. ‘Jed loves steak and onion pie.’
‘Love my pie, love me,’ said Eleanor. ‘You’ve got a hope. Why don’t you just give him frozen curry? How is Jed?’
‘Working in his study,’ said Prune. ‘Poor. Jed. He works so hard. He longs for a son and I can’t give him one. And if I gave him frozen curry I’d feel even more useless. One day he’ll leave me and it will all be my fault. Then what will I do?’
‘Begin your life,’ said Eleanor. ‘You’d better begin soon or it’ll all be gone.’
‘You’ve changed,’ said Prune, through onion tears. ‘You’re hard and cynical. I’m glad I’m not like you. Besides,’ she added, ‘what can I do? I never got my degree; I’m not trained for anything; I can’t do anything. I get asthma if I try. All I do is cry all the time, or gasp for breath, so who would ever employ me? What kind of CV have I got?’
‘Spent life trying to have babies,’ said Eleanor, ‘and failing,’ and went on up to see Jed.
‘Are you staying to lunch?’ Prune called after her. She had long straight hair and wore flat wide shoes. ‘Do stay to lunch. I’m sorry if I was rude. I’m upset, that’s all. Jed would love you to stay to lunch. We never see anyone.’
Eleanor went up the red-carpeted suburban stairs and knocked at the door on the left, where a little white plaque with a rim of roses said ‘Study’. Inside, in a leather chair, sat Jed, at ease and happy, smoking a pipe, reading galley proofs. He had a pleasant, lined face and a jaw which protruded, as a goat’s does, and slightly rheumy eyes, though Eleanor remembered them as bright, bright, bright. Books lined the walls; papers lay on the floor: on ledges stood mandalas, icons, pentacles. A book jacket rough lay on the table—‘The Story of the Pentacle: a Study in Self-oppression’.
Incense burned and mixed with the pipe smoke: the room was warm, scented, foggy.
‘I know why you’ve come,’ said Jed. ‘You’ve come looking for the villain of the piece. Well, you’re looking in the wrong place. How healthy you seem. The high life suits you.’
‘It suits everyone,’ said Eleanor.
He rose to his feet. His jacket was brown and tweedy, and had orangy leather patches on its sleeves at the elbow. He smelt of pipe tobacco and wet dogs; a Labrador lay by the hearth. Jed was taller than she was by some four inches. She laid her head on his shoulder; she could not do that with Julian. He wore sandals and no socks. He would never wear red sock suspenders. His feet would look strange in the shiny, elegant, pointed shoes which Julian wore. Jed and Julian were two bookends. Other men took their place in between.
‘Yes, you are a villain,’ said Eleanor. ‘You seduced your best friend’s wife.’
‘You seduced me,’ he said. ‘You were bored.’
‘And Brenda?’
‘She asked me to. She was inquisitive.’
‘And Nerina?’
‘She wanted a little excitement before she settled down. It was not my idea.’
‘She was a student. You were her teacher.’
‘Quite so. I taught her and her friends what they wanted to know. All anyone really wants to know about is sex. Information is second best.’
He undid the buttons of her blouse. She stayed where she was, for once indecisive.
‘Same shape,’ he said, ‘same size. I have good tactile memory.’
‘And poor Prune. What about poor Prune?’
‘Sex is the great energizer,’ he said. ‘I wish poor Prune could understand that. She only gets pregnant so we can’t have sex: she’s liable to miscarriage, you know. I see it as an act of vengeance. It is not a happy marriage. But I can’t just ditch her, can I? Where would she go? What would she do? Poor Prune. She loves me.’
‘Poor Prune,’ said Eleanor. ‘Was she always poor Prune?’
‘When I married her,’ said Jed, ‘she was a lovely, lively Prunella. Her name was a joke; her life was a joke: that was why I married her. Marriage is a fearful institution. What it does to people! Take off your clothes, Ellen. Poor Prune won’t come in. She’s hurt her ankle. She can’t get up the stairs. She won’t mind. She just wants me to be happy. She thinks if I’m happy I won’t leave her. She thinks it’s unhappiness breaks up homes.’
‘But it isn’t,’ said Eleanor, ‘it’s sheer surplus of energy.’
She took off her jacket, belt, her scarf, her jeans, her blouse. She wore a red bra, red pants and red suspenders to keep up her black stockings.
‘That is nice,’ said Jed. ‘Prune wears washed cotton, whitish grey. It’s so sensible. It stretches. And you wear red and black and end up with a poor withered old stick of a Vice Chancellor. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘He is not so,’ said Eleanor, refastening her bra as fast as Jed undid it. ‘He’s a fine man and I’m proud of him. In fact I love him.’
‘Nerina’s curse strikes again,’ said Jed. ‘How’s he keeping?’
‘A little heart palpitation,’ said Eleanor.
‘I should watch that,’ said Jed. ‘How’s Bernard? I heard he was back in the faith. I heard he had a bad back. I heard all kinds of things and none of them good.’
‘Don’t you see him at all?’
‘He’s a loser,’ said Jed. ‘I don’t.’ Eleanor put her jeans on.
‘What a pity,’ said Jed. ‘I seem to have said the wrong thing. Suspenders under jeans. Prune would never do a thing like that.’
‘You’ve kept in remarkably good health.’ said Eleanor, putting on her blouse. ‘Considering.’
‘I have my punishment,’ said Jed. ‘I have poor Prune. I’m sorry you’re leaving. Can’t I persuade you to stay?’
‘Not with Prune downstairs making lunch,’ said Eleanor. ‘I really shouldn’t.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Jed. ‘As you see, I’m no villain. Just another victim. Personally, I blame Philip Horrocks, Head of Faculty. He panicked and disbanded my mass hysteria group overnight. They’d used the college library to try to castrate a goat. I would have stopped it had I known. There was blood splashed over the walls—it got away, mid-slice. Tender-hearted vegetarians, most of our students. No idea how to deal with animals. Have they, Rufus?’ He stirred the dog with his sandalled toe. Rufus sighed. ‘You won’t change your mind, Ellen? No? Pity. Academia lost a very promising student in Nerina: that’s my main quarrel with Horrocks. One more little balls-up: one more contribution to the drop-out rate. Another young person turns their back on education. Yes, I blame Horrocks. Why don’t you go and see Nerina? She and I are still in touch, of course.’
‘She scares me.’
‘Nothing scares you, Ellen.’
‘I don’t like Julian’s heart jumping about. Where will it end?’
‘Go and ask Nerina. She’s quite safe, at the moment. She’s de-energized. Married, covered in black, with a nose mask and pregnant. Her mother lives with them.’
‘Is it your baby?’
He looked helpless, but flattered.
‘How would I know?’ He shook his head sagely, sat back in his armchair and attended to his pipe. He was not the man he was, but hadn’t noticed.
‘Once they’d castrated the goat, what would they have done?’ asked Eleanor.
‘God knows what their fantasy was. Boiled its balls for dinner and served them up to Satan. They’d left me way behind.’
‘Lunchtime, darling,’ called poor Prune from down below.
Nerina had set up house with Sharif above a betting shop and next to a fish-and-chip takeaway, as if to underline her determination to be ordinary. Eleanor felt Nerina had somewhat overdone it and was not reassured. The door was opened by a young man in his mid twenties, dark-eyed, olive-skinned, hook-nosed, broad of shoulder; in general handsome in mien and appearance. He was both smooth and fierce. Lucky Nerina, thought Eleanor, and lowered her eyes from the brilliance of his countenance, as she could see she was expected to do.
‘Well?’ He wore a white shirt, open-necked, and dark trousers. He had a heavy gold bracelet on his wrist and rings on his fingers. He was tall. His feet were long: his shoes were clean, but not pointed, as Julian’s were. She felt dissatisfied with Julian and with herself for not having been dissatisfied with him in the past.
‘I came to call on Nerina’s mother,’ said Eleanor. And she explained how she and Mrs Khalid had worked together at the poly: she wished to renew an old acquaintance.
Sharif yelled over his shoulder, ‘Ma-in-law!’ and Mrs Khalid came clatter-clatter downstairs wearing a sari and solid black walking shoes.
‘Oh, it’s Ellen! Ellen can come in. She’s okay,’ she told Sharif, and Sharif moved aside, though he seemed doubtful as to whether it was wise. Eleanor walked in, brushing past him, conscious of the mere breath of the air that stood between her flesh and his: the hairs on her arms stood up to make the distance less. But he had no interest in her. She was beneath him—it showed in his expression: naked-faced, naked-armed, green-eyed and indecorous female that she was.
The room was small and cosy, stuffed with sofas and chairs and little tables, and the telephone was a prostrate Mickey Mouse with his legs in the air, yellow-booted. Mrs Khalid served tea and sticky cakes and asked about Ellen’s life. She herself was no longer working, Mrs Khalid said. Her son-in-law Sharif didn’t want her to. Nerina was pregnant and needed her at home. Sharif, satisfied as to the tenor of their conversation, left the room. Presently Nerina came down, in black robes and nose shield, and with only her eyes showing. Her face was plumper than before: her figure could scarcely be observed. She took off her mask and her skin had a clear and rather attractive pallor. Then Nerina smiled, and Eleanor wondered why she had told Jed she was scared. Who could be scared of this sweet, bright, pretty girl? ‘Don’t ask,’ Nerina said.
‘Just don’t ask! But I’ll tell you—yes, fancy dress is worth it.’
‘But supposing,’ said Eleanor, ‘he brings in another three wives?’
Mrs Khalid laughed a little curtly.
‘He couldn’t afford it,’ she said. ‘He can only just afford us. Look at it like this,’ said Nerina,’ ‘a quarter of my husband is worth one of any other man.’ Her hands came out from beneath the black robes and they were long-fingered and red-nailed. They moved with a kind of nervous energy. ‘Look,’ she said to Eleanor, ‘I tried it out there in the western world. I really did. I just got myself and everyone into trouble. I like it like this. Doing nothing, just being. Honour the Prophet and keep his laws: nothing to it. It gets quite boring, but presently you just slow down to keep pace with life.’
‘She’s having twins,’ said Mrs Khalid. ‘That slows anyone down.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Eleanor.
‘You don’t want babies yourself?’ enquired Nerina politely.
‘My husband already has grown-up children,’ replied Eleanor, even more politely. ‘We have decided not to have more.’
Mrs Khalid went out to boil water for another pot of tea.
‘I was always surprised that worked,’ said Nerina. ‘You and Julian Darcy. Not just worked but stuck. I thought it was going to be quite a problem. Part of the curse on Bernard, of course, was losing you. He was to have a faithless wife, but that involved two other people, you and Mr X. We used a photograph of you at a meeting: it was Jed’s idea of a joke to pick the Vice Chancellor. If you can get two people on paper you circle them and dance around a bit and whip up the vibes and you can get them into bed together pretty quick, which we did. We didn’t mean it to last, but then the college made a stink and we couldn’t get back into the library. We were banned, because of one stupid, smelly goat. Anyway you can’t put spells on guiltless people. They don’t work. So I thought you probably all deserved whatever was happening. Then it had all got tacky and I wanted out.’
‘What was Bernard guilty of?’
‘He and Jed tossed up as to who would have me, and I found out, too late. Jed won, as you know.’
‘Oh.’ She felt like crying. Bernard! ‘Too late for what?’ she asked.
‘For my virginity, stupid,’ said Nerina, and her black robe heaved as her babies kicked and churned.
‘Nerina,’ said Eleanor, ‘Julian’s heart isn’t too good.’
‘Nothing to do with me,’ said Nerina. ‘I expect you just wear him out. I expect that’s his punishment for leaving his wife.’
‘But,’ said Eleanor, ‘you just said it was all your doing—’
‘Always twisting and turning,’ said Nerina, crossly, ‘looking for someone to blame. Why choose me? Why not blame yourself?’
Mrs Khalid came back with a teapot and some shortbread.
‘And I don’t want any of anything mentioned in front of Sharif. If Sharif found out he’d kill me.’
‘Twins are always premature,’ observed Mrs Khalid. ‘Just as well.’
Sharif came back and walked around the room to make sure nothing untoward was happening, high cheekbones glistening, bony hand through dark hair in anxiety. Nerina replaced her mask. Sharif clearly felt better. He nodded his approval. He almost smiled. He loved her. She was his most precious object. He wanted no part of her harmed. He went out again. The black bundle that was Nerina glowed with self-congratulation. Ellen thought of Bernard, thought of Prune, thought of Jed, thought of herself, transmuted from Ellen to a goat-inflicted fantasy that was Eleanor. Eleanor laughed and said, ‘Twins! Twins with orangy yellow elbows!’
Nerina stopped being a cosy black bundle and turned into a thin black wraith, by virtue, Eleanor thought, of standing straight, still and offended. Her metal nose mask caught the light from a dancing-girl lamp.
Mrs Khalid said, rather sharply, ‘I don’t think much of your idea of damage containment, Ellen.’
Nerina relaxed and said, ‘That’s okay, Mum. I don’t think it was anything too bad. I’ll go and lie down a bit. They aren’t half kicking about inside.’ And she smiled at Eleanor. Mrs Khalid relaxed too.
Mrs Khalid said as Eleanor went, ‘Lovely to see you again, dear. Such a pity Nerina didn’t stay on at college. But you know what love is.’
‘I do,’ said Eleanor.
Mrs Khalid’s nails were worn to the quick. When she’d been working they’d been long and polished. Eleanor had admired them.
‘I hope everything goes well for you,’ said Mrs Khalid at the front door. ‘I really do. As for me, I just try and keep Nerina happy.’
She shut the door, and it seemed to Eleanor that everything was safe and cosy inside, and noisy and dangerous outside. On the wide pavement in front of her, people of all shapes and sizes and ages crossed and criss-crossed, frenetic in their activity, like ants; yet dull in expression, apathetic of mien. No one was beautiful. Most were in some way distorted or deformed. It was not a good area. A vent at her feet gusted steam from the processes of frying fish in what smelt like everlasting oil, and whirled discarded wrapping paper about her ankles. What was everyone doing? They seemed to understand their own purposes but perhaps they didn’t, any more than she did. A mini-whirlwind lifted a polystyrene dish—large chips, large fish—and it hit her midriff. It didn’t hurt but she was quite afraid.
Valerie laughs thrice
HAD MY RELATIONSHIP WITH Hugo been like any other in the world, and not so very special, I might have thought he was what the columns of Aura refer to as ‘cooling off’. He arrived at the hotel room which was our home apparently exhausted and just a little offhand. Instead of instant lovemaking he sat in the armchair and asked me to ring room service for coffee. There are no coffee-making facilities in the Holiday Inn; if you want any you have to ask them to bring it up, and however hard the staff try to look disinterested, professional and enigmatic, I have no doubt but they return to the kitchens and have the most animated conversations about myself and Hugo. Especially since Stef, on leaving, apparently shouted at the unfortunate girls in reception, ‘There are a pair of adulterers living it up in Room 301, and like as not paying only the single rate. I suggest you look into it!’ Or so the bellboy, trying to be helpful, told me. He is a pleasant lad, Jack, who brings up and takes down the many faxes that travelled between myself and Aura, Hugo and the Independent.
Hugo then took out a packet of cigarettes and smoked one. The entire third floor was designated as a non-smoking area. They ask at reception when you book in. ‘You haven’t started smoking again!’ I said in surprise.
‘The first one for six years,’ he said. ‘The strain of all this is getting to me.’
Now this disappointed me. Naturally I wanted to be a source of happiness to him, not strain. Sensing my reaction, he put out his free hand and stroked mine. I didn’t remind him about the third floor being a smoke-free zone. Stef, I have no doubt, would have done exactly that. It’s all too easy to fall into a maternal role in any relationship—being either the good mother, or the bad mother—and it doesn’t do. (I write for Aura—I read Aura. I know these things. I have no choice.)
I told Hugo about Belinda’s visit, but not about Brenda’s letter; the burning of which now seemed to me a rather pointless exercise in deceit. Hugo’s actual presence dampened the smouldering mixture of anxiety and jealousy which I was learning to live with. Soon, I supposed, I would be so used to it I would hardly notice my changed state. Valerie-with-Lou and Valerie-with-Hugo would feel the same, though they were not. But just to have him sitting there, long-legged, loose-limbed, the two of us engaged in a common purpose, enfolded in a cloud of intimacy that now seemed as real out of bed as in it, gave me great pleasure.
Then he said, ‘I have something I ought to tell you, though Eleanor Darcy asked me not to.’ I felt myself shiver with apprehension, fear of what he was going to say, but it turned out to be nothing. ‘She even makes me turn the tape off and insists I treat it as off the record. She has revelations. All this stuff about Darcy’s Utopia is dictated to her, she claims, by a kind of shining cloud.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
‘Like God appearing to Moses in a burning bush, or the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed as a shining pillar?’ I asked. ‘If nothing else, Eleanor Darcy has delusions of grandeur.’
But Hugo did not laugh.
‘I was walking to the pub with her,’ he said, ‘and there was definitely a kind of light dancing round her head. I was dazzled.’ And I remembered how I keep writing about the luminosity of her flesh and I felt another kind of shiver, this one starting in the back of the neck and travelling downwards so that Hugo seemed to feel it too: his hand pressed more firmly on mine to quieten it.
‘Well,’ I said, as lightly as I could, ‘we’re all dazzled by Eleanor. But does the light come from God or the Devil? The Church is still arguing about St Joan’s voices and St Teresa’s visions. Whether they’d beatify you or burn you alive you never could be sure. Anyway,’ I added after a little, because he’d wanted my attention not my comments, my agreement not my doubt, and it was obvious on his face, ‘all this Utopia stuff, as you put it, is for you to deal with. I don’t know why she keeps going on about it to me. Me, I’m just human interest, women’s magazine. You’re the big time.’
‘I’ll have none of that professional rivalry from you,’ he said, relaxing. ‘Leave that to Stef. I’m really proud of the way you sent Stef packing. She causes trouble wherever she goes. She’s used to being the one in control. She’s the arch-manipulator of all time. I should never have married her.’
And we talked about other things than Eleanor Darcy and our coffee came up; and the waiter raised his eyebrows at Hugo’s cigarette, which I was glad to see he didn’t stub out but continued to smoke, defiantly. I like a man who is not frightened by waiters. And presently when Hugo and I found ourselves in bed, for once a little later than sooner, he said to me—‘Together we remake the universe, you and I,’ and I knew what he meant. He’d had a vasectomy: I’d had my tubes tied: there was no way we could make children. But infusing our love was that sense of a further, deeper purpose than our pleasure alone, which comes so naturally when we’re young and fertile, and is not noticed till it’s gone. I wondered where it came from. It seemed hardly ours by right: it seemed like something given, but who was there to give it?
Later, I asked him where the shining cloud was located that spoke to Eleanor Darcy and he actually said, why, down the end of Brenda’s garden; the other side of the fence, in a little copse just this side of the railway embankment. And I laughed again but, remembering the uneasy vividness of the afternoon she and I had tried to talk in the garden and the tape had failed to record, felt less like laughing.
‘She calls it Darcy’s Utopia, surely,’ I said, ‘because it was all part and parcel of Julian Darcy’s mad scheme to reshape the economy.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Hugo. ‘A great many of Darcy’s ideas came from Eleanor. He was obviously very much under her thumb. And the ideas are not as mad as you might suppose.’ And Hugo, I knew, though he couldn’t bring himself quite to say so, was beginning to feel Eleanor’s ideas came from the Supreme Being, the Prime Mover: that they were more than notions—they were instructions.
‘You know what she told me?’ said Hugo. ‘She told me we should not see ourselves as God’s children, but as God’s parents. We are not the created, but the creators. What we have to do is be worthy of the love offered us by our creation.’
And I laughed for the third time, and said, ‘Well, I’d have more trouble than the Apostles ever did cleaning up Jesus’s act, let alone the Companions with Mohammed, in trying to present Eleanor Darcy to the readers of Aura as saint and/or messenger.
And I kept to myself the notion that God must work in an exceedingly mysterious way, in choosing so flawed and cracked a vessel as myself to record Eleanor Darcy’s life, obliging me to write it while myself trapped in a state of most acute sin—if we were to look at it traditionally, which I had no intention of doing, or through Lou’s beady eyes, or Stef’s manic ones, or the puzzled eyes of the five children Hugo’s and my love for each other affected—so mysterious indeed as to make you think we were much more likely to be talking about the Devil than of God. But I didn’t say that to Hugo. I wanted him there beside me on the king-size Holiday Inn bed and that was that.
LOVER AT THE GATE [12]
A disturbance in the economy
JULIAN WAS TO SPEND Wednesday at 11 Downing Street, in conference with the fiscal advisers to the Treasury. At two in the morning he stirred Eleanor awake.
‘These ceaseless problems with the economy,’ he said, ‘are because we’ve never had the nerve to do things properly. We’ve talked about cheap money,’ he said, ‘but we’ve never made it really cheap. We devalue the pound but only on paper. We use it to make people poor, not rich.’
‘Of course,’ said Eleanor, ‘to make the poor rich is to make the rich poor. That’s why we never do it properly.’
His fingers strayed over her breast. She thought of Sharif the beautiful. She wasn’t surprised Mrs Khalid had encouraged her daughter’s marriage. Now they were all bound together: like Rhoda to Wendy to Ken to herself to Bernard, and round again to one-eyed Gillian, for Ken would lose Gillian to Bernard; it was inevitable. And through Jed, through the joining of flesh, to Nerina, and all others before or since: except some seem to count, and some not to count, as did, or did not, death. Some deaths affect you: others don’t, for no reason that you can see. A close friend dies and not a feeling in you stirs: an acquaintance passes on: you weep and wail. As with death, so with sexual partners. Some count, some don’t. Jed counted and she hadn’t known it. If you knew it, would you do it? Most certainly you would. The connections are there to be made. They are foretold, inevitable. That’s why the pleasure goes with them: what you do is the fulfilment of fate’s will.
‘Think of me,’ said Julian, ‘think of me, not whatever you’re thinking of.’
‘I am thinking of you,’ she said.
‘What did you just say then?’ he asked.
‘To make the poor rich is to make the rich poor,’ she repeated. ‘That’s why we never do it properly.’
‘The creative approach to economics!’ he murmured, not without disparagement, into the dark. ‘But you’re right. Now if we were to make money really cheap—the Treasury just might do it. They have to do something. Shortages are endemic. It’s almost as bad in London now as it ever was in Moscow: if you want petrol you have to buy it out of someone else’s tank.’
‘That’s because the tanker men are on strike.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he said gloomily. ‘They were provoked into striking in order to mask the true situation, to give us time to think our way out of this one. We have no option but to jolt the economy. Electric shock it out of depression!’
‘You could always stand on street corners and give money away,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
‘It might do it,’ he said. ‘It just might do it. The old Keynesian way of work creation without the distorting effects of actually doing the work.’
He rolled over and went to sleep. She did not mind one bit. She dreamt of Sharif, which she seemed to be able to do to order. He beat her for her wickedness, and made her shroud herself in black robes as punishment, and she and Nerina shared a bed and he came to both of them while Mrs Khalid listened in the room next door. She had no choice. The house was small, the walls were thin: no wonder she bit her nails.
When Eleanor woke, luxurious and sated, Julian was pulling on his socks and suspenders. He was bright-eyed and elated.
‘It’s the answer,’ he said. ‘The answer! And thank God it’s one of those days when I could convince anyone of anything!’
And so it seemed it was: the meeting went on for only four hours of an anticipated six. The media, domestic and international, hovered outside the door both at Downing Street and Bridport Lodge. Eleanor was much photographed in mesh tights, but remained loyal, though, she felt, in some way coy. ‘If anyone can find a way,’ she found herself saying, unable to stop it, ‘my husband will. He’s a genius. He’s quite nervy, but that always goes with brilliance. He was hospitalized for depression when he was twenty-one. He had a course of ECG, which cured him. Just like Tom Eagleton: remember? McGovern’s running mate. Wasn’t that unfair, that whole business of being unfit for office because of a nervous breakdown? But it was all part of some smear campaign, wasn’t it?’
The think-tank emerged beaming from its meeting. A statement would be made on Monday. On Sunday morning at ten o’clock, without warning, the cash dispensers of the high street banks up and down the nation began to spew out notes. An hour of fives, an hour of tens, an hour of twenties. Then an hour’s pause. Then the cycle began again: neat packages of new notes slid gracefully, unasked, from under their tactful slots, on and on and on.
At first, as the press later reported—the home press subdued and embarrassed, the international press quite hysterical with glee—the public were nervous and suspicious: they kept their distance: then quickly the police arrived, suspecting a malfunction, to guard this enigmatic money supply from looters. As it so happened it was a wet and windy day: in many parts of the country the wind that so often whistles along the high streets whistled to good effect, and whipped wet notes over shops and into alleys and gardens and under the noses of the drunk, the wretched and the homeless, who on the whole disregarded them, understanding well enough that money was not the solution to their problems; what they needed was not to smell and to find someone to like them enough to be prepared to take them in. Word came from on high and the police went back to their headquarters: and, nervously, those who needed the notes to pay electricity and gas bills and mortgages began to gather them up and took them home to their children to count, and were thus relieved of anxiety, and smiled over the meal, and forgot to blame whoever was usually to blame, and made love to wives or husbands, as well as inclination or vigour would allow, and said to their children, okay, if you don’t want to go to school, don’t go: and to themselves, the job I do is pointless, useless; what is more I hate doing it and stayed in bed, and only those who thought, the job I do is valuable, others need me, depend upon me; I like doing it, went, and the traffic moved freely, because there was half the usual volume, and the petrol tanker men went back to work because, as their leader said that Monday morning, ‘Everything’s upside down; the government’s gone insane; we’d better not add to it.’
On Monday noon the machines stopped exuding money. ‘The fools,’ said Julian Darcy. ‘The fools. If they lose their nerve now, they’ve had it! Compromise, compromise! It will be the end of us!’
The move had been made on the strength of a majority of one, he told Eleanor. He had been eloquent in support of the action; others had supported it in theory but wanted time to think about it. An amendment had been moved but lost, to first educate the public, issue instructions; dole out money to the deserving poor, not undeserving: which, as Julian had pointed out, was no different than an increase in benefits: this faction had been defeated. Julian had argued for surprise, for the shock tactics which would jolt the economy out of depression, and he had won the day.
The fury of the country was very great indeed: though whether because it had happened or because it had stopped happening those who stood in the crowds in the public squares did not seem quite to know. The Prime Minister resigned: the EEC put in a stop-gap government of bureaucrats: martial law was briefly imposed: a new currency introduced, conforming to EEC standard. Although, as a few dissidents observed, the three hundred million pounds’ worth of notes which the corner banks had distributed had scarcely affected inflation rates at all. But it was not a popular thing to say. Public pride had been offended. To believe a nation could do without money! Somebody’s fault: Rasputin’s fault: Rasputin of Bridport, the genius who had nervous breakdowns, moved his young mistress into his wife’s bed, dined on champagne and caviar while firing his staff.
‘They’ll blame me,’ said Julian. ‘I know they will. A prophet is always dishonoured in his own country. I’ll be the fall guy. Why did you say that about my having shock treatment when I was twenty-one?’
‘Because it was true.’
‘You don’t love me, you never have. My troubles began when I first encountered you, when I came to your gate—’
‘The lover at the gate,’ said Eleanor, ‘comes for more than he knows.’
‘I should never have left Georgina,’ said Julian. ‘This is my punishment. In my own house I am not believed.’
‘In your own house you are believed,’ said Eleanor. ‘And it was a good time while it lasted.’
The police came in the early hours and took Julian away, giving him not even time to put on his socks and shoes. They made him wear his slippers. They had trumped up, it seemed, charges of tax evasion, corruption and waste of public funds. Eleanor followed him to the police cars in the drive. There were four of them, all flashing their lights in the dawn.
‘It goes against the grain to apologize,’ Julian said, ‘but I shouldn’t have said the hard things I did. I was upset. I love you very much. I don’t regret a minute of it. Two years’ perfect happiness is more than many a man has in his lifetime. But now the nation is humiliated in the eyes of the world and it seems I must pay the price for it. I wonder how many years I’ll get? Will I be allowed pen and paper?’
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’ll see you are. The nation mustn’t lose a genius. I’ll wait for you.’
And she smiled and waved encouragingly, though she knew she lied. There was no need for him to be more unhappy than he had to be.
Eleanor, pursued by the press, went first to stay with Jed and poor Prune, but Prune, who seemed to have regained her will and spirits, and was considering adoption, asked her to leave within the week. ‘It’s not just the media forever at the door,’ she said, ‘or you and Jed droning on about free money economics at the dinner table, or the way you sneer at my stews, it’s never knowing what you and Jed are up to. If Jed kept himself to himself more I’d get pregnant. He just wastes his energies.’
‘That’s hardly scientific,’ said Eleanor.
‘I don’t care what it is,’ said Prune. ‘You just leave me and Jed alone. Go and live with your husband.’
‘I can’t. He’s in prison,’ said Eleanor.
‘Where you put him,’ said Prune, ‘with your mad ideas. I mean your real husband, your proper husband, the one and only. You married poor Bernard to get away from home, but that’s your bed; you chose it, you lie in it.’
It seemed not a bad idea to Eleanor, who felt an unusual need for friends and family, but Gillian said she’d rather Eleanor didn’t come to stay, one way and another. Why didn’t she just go on swanning around up at Bridport Lodge? But Eleanor said she couldn’t: Georgina had returned with a battery of lawyers: the university was being merged into the polytechnic: the place hardly existed any more. It had no future role as the arbiter of national economic policy.
‘Oh dear,’ said Gillian, ‘you’ve come such a long way and ended up with nothing! At least Bernard and I have each other. He’s got quite a little business going selling fancy cars.’
‘He doesn’t know one end of an engine from another,’ said Eleanor.
‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Gillian. ‘He was born honest and people know it. That’s all that counts.’
But Gillian did let her round to see Ken. Last time she’d seen him he’d been wrapped in blankets because the gas bill had not been paid and the central heating had been cut off. But he’d been quick off the mark on Loony Sunday, as the media now referred to it, and all the bills were paid. The house glowed with heat and light. It had even been dusted. He was uninterested in Eleanor’s predicament, or the events which had led up to it. A jazz band, circa 1925, was in performance on the television. He did not turn the volume down.
‘I lost Gillian to your Bernard,’ he said, loudly and cheerfully.
‘Can’t say I mind much. She goes on looking after me. Tell you what, I tottered round to No. 93 the other day. It’s been sold at last. Loony Sunday saw to that. Saw your mother there, bold as brass, bright as day.’
‘Rhoda?’
‘No, not Rhoda, Wendy. Your mother.’
‘Did she speak?’
‘How could she? She was dead. She just stood there in a kind of pillar of light.’
‘Was she angry with you?’
‘Not particularly. Why should she be?’
Eleanor switched off the television.
‘Because you made her pregnant, failed to marry her, neglected her, drove her to drink and then married her mother.’
Ken considered. ‘It’s one way of looking at it,’ he said, ‘but not the way I do. Personally, I blame Rhoda.’
He turned the television on again, but Eleanor thought he looked a little shaken. She was glad.
Belinda was cool on the telephone and said, ‘Frank really had a hard time over that stupid money business. It was beneath his dignity to go round picking up money from the street and now everyone’s paid off their mortgage but him. Whatever was Julian thinking? It’s distorted everything and Frank’s furious. You struggle and struggle and suddenly what’s it all about? I don’t think it’s really sensible for you to come to stay, Ellen.’
Brenda said Eleanor was more than welcome to stay as long as she wanted, but perhaps she should wait until the media attention had cooled down a little, and the trial was over: she wasn’t too keen on having the children exposed to the full glare of publicity; she wanted them to live simple lives. Eleanor said she thought it was very likely they would, and took up Liese’s offer of her holiday home; a pretty, simple house in the Forest of Dean. Here she sat out Julian’s trial. Julian was acquitted of tax evasion but found guilty of misuse of public funds—the hospitality offered at Graduation Week events seen in retrospect as grossly extravagant—and was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Eleanor, in the healing tranquillity of nature, for the space of a year, kept her silence before returning to civilization and ordinary society, and most generously offering the story of her life to you, the readers of Aura.
Of her spiritual journey during that year she remains silent: it must be left to someone other than myself, Valerie Jones, to record and communicate. It is my part to write the gospel only of the early years.