Lou comes to the Holiday Inn
I WENT DOWN TO reception myself to ask them to fax through the last pages of manuscript to Aura. The manager asked to have a few words with me: there had been some trouble with Hugo’s Amex card: he was sorry to have to trouble me, but could I register my card with him? I said naturally I would, but the truth was I only had Visa and that, I knew, was way above limit. I looked around for Lou, who, although he growls at such times, usually gives good advice, and then thought, but I’ve left Lou. I’ve left home. I’m with Hugo. And I found myself thinking, Hugo? Who’s Hugo?, which was very strange.
I could hear the fax machine going in the office behind reception and with every page it was as if some blight were being scraped away, some languorous, over-sweet, sickly fungus. It hurt as it lifted: as sudden bright light hurts those long incarcerated in the dark. Of course it did. Bits of tender, soggy skin were tearing off with the mould.
‘Could I just sit down?’ I said to the manager, and he helped me to an armchair with a rather firm squeeze, which might have been a policeman’s touch, or that of a man who knows the woman he touches has been holed up in a room with a man for weeks. How could I tell? Had it been weeks, days? I would have to look at the hotel account to find out. I could see myself in the mirror: bleary, hair uncombed. What was I wearing? One of Hugo’s shirts? Quite a nice pink striped one, I was glad to see: and track suit bottoms in mauve velvet. Not me at all. My children! I was a Woman with children. Where were they? Who was looking after them?
I was beginning to feel quite distressed by my own confusion: but then the revolving doors, which had never ceased their activity as I sat there, perpetually throwing in and drawing out the well-heeled and the faceless, produced quite suddenly three people with faces: Lou, Sophie, Ben, preceded by another, whom I presently recognized as Kirsty Bull, if only by the size of her legs: she had the kind of flat pudding face which could belong to anyone. She came straight up to me.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I made them come. They didn’t want to. They’re all furious. You’ve been a right bitch. They’re helpless without you. Your husband’s insane. Everything’s done to the metronome, from the washing-up to sex. I can’t leave them on their own. They’re not fit. So here they are. You organize them.’
And she swept out of the revolving door.
‘What a terrible woman,’ said Lou. ‘Female double-bass players are always like that. I should never have asked her in, but what was I to do? I had a concert and Ben had an exam.’
I had forgotten about Ben’s exam.
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘I got my grade eight,’ he said, ‘no thanks to you.’
‘Don’t you talk to me like that ever again,’ I said, thinking fast, and to Sophie before she could open her mouth, ‘Or you either. If you’ve learned your lesson then I’ll come home. Pay the bill, Lou.’
And the children looked quite nervous and subdued and Lou just went to the desk and took out his credit card and paid what was owing, without even studying the details of the account, and I felt not guilty but self-righteous. It was a very strange feeling, as if it came from outside me. The words ‘a sure touch’ came into my head: it seemed a bequest from Eleanor: a compensation for injury more like it. ‘She has a sure touch with men.’ What a gift! Especially since what to other women might be injury—to fall in love against your will and almost without reason—to me had been both an enlightenment and a joy, inasmuch as it was not an ongoing state of affairs, but had, just like that, and with the finishing of Lover at the Gate, come to a full stop.
While Lou was still at the desk Hugo came into the hotel and walked straight past me to the lifts. I called him. He turned to look at me and for quite a while he didn’t recognize me. Then he said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Valerie. You look so different!’ I said, ‘So do you.’ He said, ‘Are you going home now?’ It was like the embarrassment after a one-night stand, when neither knows quite how to behave. Yet we’d shared so much. He seemed as puzzled as I had been a little earlier.
‘I finished Lover at the Gate,’ I said, to put him at his ease. ‘And Lou has paid the bill.’
‘Lou?’
‘My husband.’
‘That’s good of him,’ said Hugo. ‘Some mix-up with my Amex card.’
I introduced him to Lou.
‘We’ve been working together,’ said Hugo. ‘On a most extraordinary story.’
‘So I gather,’ said Lou bleakly.
Hugo said, ‘It’s going to change the face of the world,’ and I said, ‘It may take more than Eleanor Darcy to do that,’ and Hugo handed me a tape and said, ‘Listen to that. I had it copied. You can keep it. We’ll be in touch, naturally.’
‘If you don’t come home at once, Valerie, I may not have you,’ said Lou and I said, ‘I’ll come home when I’m good and ready,’ which shook him and shook me, and Sophie and Ben watched open-mouthed as their parents spatted. I asked Hugo to give them a pound coin each so they could go and play the fruit machines. Lou said, ‘I don’t allow the children money just to gamble away,’ and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t ask you, Lou.’ And he meditated this, while Hugo found the coins.
Hugo was a tall man with rather stooped shoulders and a lean, intelligent look. I thought I’d probably quite like him if I met him at a party, or was sat next to him at a Media Awards Dinner, but no more. I wondered what he thought of me, now that we could see each other clearly, now that whatever wrinkle it was, whatever upset in the general run-along pattern of events had brushed us up against each other, and held us in place until we could be let go. The marvel was that others had waited for us—for me, at any rate. I was not sure what Stef would do.
‘Lou,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t it be really nice if Hugo and his wife came round to supper one day?’
Lou said doubtfully, ‘It might.’
Hugo said, ‘Well, actually, I think I’m going to change my way of life. I don’t think you’ll see me on the dinner-party circuit any more.’
Lou said he’d never noticed him there in the first place, but that was just Lou. Some things don’t change and I wouldn’t want them to.
And I went back to Room 301 to change and presently walked out of the hotel dressed in the same clothes I had come in—the boring little black dress and the sand-coloured wrap. I couldn’t think why I’d bought either in the first place.
That night I listened to the tape Hugo gave me as his last gift, the brief record of his final interview with Eleanor Darcy.
Hugo and Eleanor walk down to the end of the garden
A: RULES? YOU WANT rules? You really can’t survive without a book of rules? Hasn’t the human race progressed at all? Can’t you decide, one by one, what’s right, what’s wrong? Do you have to continue to believe in groups? Do you have to believe in the God of your neighbours? Can’t you create one of your own? Surely you know enough by now about yourselves, your compulsions, your motivations, your sibling rivalries, your anal retentiveness, your territorial aggressions and so forth? Have your prophets and wise men, your therapists and social philosophers, taught you nothing? Is it so confusing that you just can’t begin to solve it at all; can’t work hard to build heaven on earth, but prefer to trust in the one after death? I don’t believe it. You underrate yourselves. So you’ll get no rules from me. I tell you this much, there is no excuse any more, you can’t claim ignorance: if you get Darcy’s Utopia wrong there’s going to be no forgiveness: it’ll be too late.
Then Hugo’s voice, a commentary:
Eleanor Darcy was trembling. The morning was chill. She had refused to put on a coat. I took her arm but she shook me off. The grass was bright with dew. The sun had reached the edge of the railway embankment. It dazzled.
Q: Can you be more explicit?
A: This is off the record?
Q: Of course. Who exactly is giving this forgiveness? God?
A: Good lord no, man, in whom I incorporate the lesser, woman.
God has no concept of fairness. Man must place himself above God. God is not the father: God is the child.
Q: Don’t you think that’s rather, well, enigmatic of you?
A: Be quiet. These things are difficult to get hold of. And I’m in a hurry. Sometimes I get things wrong. How can I not? I’m human. Man exists not to worship, not to glorify, but to comprehend God so that by that comprehension God can grow. How about that? That seems the gist of it. Sometimes there are not even words for the thoughts. Other languages might be easier.
Q: I’m not hot at theology.
A: Pity. Julian was starting up a new faculty of divinity when he got struck off. They said he would have been better advised cutting courses, not adding to them. Theology, they said, wasn’t sexy as a subject. Little did they know!
Hugo’s voice:
I asked if we should turn back, on the pretext that we were cold. The front room, the sofa with red roses, seemed preferable to the dazzle we approached. I was surprised that Brenda’s children seemed so ordinary, snotty, peevish. Fed by this source of light, they should be little gods. She did not hear me; she was clearly listening to something other than me; I was glad: my nerve returned.
Q: No rules about diet, or marriage, or sex? These are the messages which usually get through.
A: Well of course, but they’re so obvious we all know them. No beef, no sheep, no pig to be eaten: they are all ecologically unsound. Dairy products in moderation. Chicken, fish, so long as the animals breed and live naturally. Empathy must be found with the animal kingdom. If you must have more protein eat each other.
Q: What did you say?
A: You heard me. But boil well first. Those are the only dietary rules I give you. Your desire to live forever should make it easy for you to fill in any number of others. Personally I find them boring. Now you have Darcy’s Utopia to create there will be some point in longevity. I have already spoken to you at length about marriage and sex. Don’t worry too much about HIV infection. Everyone dies. A virus is a small price to pay for sex. You will have to resort to nuclear power while you reduce your population and learn to live simply. You’ll just have to put up with the consequences: it’s your own fault for letting things get so badly out of control. You lost your way: you lost your vision. No one could look more than five years ahead.
Q: No punishments? No sanctions? No hellfire, no grappling hooks to drag you to the fire, no skinning alive? What are the consequences of the non-forgiveness you speak of?
A: The end of the earth, the end of you, that’s all.
Q: No hell? No heaven? Just blanking out?
Hugo’s voice:
She turned and looked at me: her being was luminous: I lowered my eyes. She laughed and the laughter was all around me. It was not nice at all.
A: It depends what you make of Darcy’s Utopia. If you find it heaven, lucky old you. Some might simply blank out with boredom, but if that’s hell it is a kinder one that any promised you in the past. I hope you see some improvement here. I do. Define yourselves more kindly; do yourselves and me that favour. After all, you’re the adults: I’m just the child.
Hugo’s voice:
I turned and went back to the house: I couldn’t bear it any longer. She went on into the light. Brenda said, ‘Oh God, she’s at it again. She goes down there, has a kind of fit: I have to drag her back to the house: she mumbles for hours: I don’t know what to do about it. I’m glad you’re writing it all down. Someone has to. I haven’t time, what with the kids and my husband working all hours.’
Valerie observes the birth of a new religion
HUGO’S ARTICLES WERE RECEIVED with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for pieces with titles such as ‘The Concept of Fiscal Negativity—a Long Hard Look’, that is to say, muted though respectful. Little by little his by-line dropped out of the columns altogether. I wondered what he was doing, and why, and where, but not for very long or very hard.
Lover at the Gate came out in Aura in serial form and won me another prize. ‘Best Fiction Biography of the Year’, a category devised, apparently, especially to meet the case. But no one interesting sat next to me at the Awards Dinner, and the decision went against publishing the work in book form, to my chagrin.
‘In a year’s time,’ my editor said, ‘everyone will have forgotten Eleanor Darcy. Pretty girls are only as interesting as the men they are with.’ And Eleanor was no longer with Julian Darcy. When he was released from prison she was not there to meet him; the media observed it, and forgot it. Julian was offered a top appointment with one of the larger banks, and accepted it, which event struck up a short-lived flurry of indignation and hilarity: when Georgina returned to him he was granted in the public mind a kind of forgiveness. But no one, it seemed, thought of Eleanor any more. My editor was right.
The house where I had interviewed Eleanor Darcy had somehow burned an impression of itself onto my eyelids. I’d see it when I closed my eyes: the most ordinary house in the world, except I’d given up thinking of houses, let alone people, as ever being ordinary. Let us just say there were many like it: semidetached, with a little square garden in the front, a rather longer one at the back; a house without pretension—just a place to live and think yourself lucky, as vibrant or dreary as its occupants.
I’d called Brenda from time to time but received no reply. I assumed she’d gone away. I wanted, without reason, to see the house again; and one day, without reason, other than that I was between assignments and both children were staying with Lou’s mother and it was eighteen months to the day from my first setting eyes on Hugo Vansitart, I drove over to the house, half remembering the way but having to consult the road map. I parked outside. The one good thing about these long, long, suburban streets is that there is usually somewhere to park. The house was empty, as I had expected. There was a ‘For Sale’ sign outside. After Loony Sunday and the resultant sudden surge in house sales, as everyone swapped over and moved to be next to jobs and friends, the market had stuck again. I had not expected its desolate look. The side gate which had barred Brenda’s children from running out onto the road swung open, off one hinge. Someone had pinned up net curtains in the front windows; an attempt, no doubt, to persuade robbers that the house was in fact occupied when it was not. I went up the side path and through into the back garden where I’d once had so unsatisfactory a tea with Eleanor Darcy. Then I had been besieged by wasps, children, passing trains; I had been assailed by the noise, the chaos, of everyday events. I had longed for order and been given none. I had felt thoroughly disrupted. Now there was nothing but silence and I didn’t like it. The signalling light up the railway line was stuck at red. I wondered again, as I often had, about the ‘dazzling light’ out here which Hugo had spoken of. I wondered if Eleanor and Brenda had rigged up some kind of spectral light machine the better to bamboozle him. It is hard, really hard, for the sceptical to give up their scepticism. It is even harder to believe than to love. How cruel Ellen was, in retrospect, to Bernard: not for leaving him, which may indeed in the end have been a kindness, but for mocking faith right out of him.
I walked down the garden towards the low back fence: on the other side of which was a width of wild, nettled ground before the steep gravelled slope of the railway track began. I hopped over the fence—these days I wear jeans and trainers: I have given up little suits and pumps, much to Sophie’s disapproval; my daughter likes to keep the differential going. I looked for, but found no wires, no bits of metal, no gauze for ectoplasm, just a kind of—how can I put it?—absence. A negativity. Wet nettles brushed the back of my hand. The leaves were rusty: there was not much sting left in them. I got back over the fence. The garden, naturally enough, was unworked and untidy, but still retained its trampled, overused, flattened air, as if even a year’s rest from small children had not been enough to get the processes of growth properly underway. Nothing, it seemed, had quite recovered from the withdrawal of whatever it was that had been there. What had Eleanor once said? What a fine fellow the Devil is, all fire and sparks and energy, but temporary? You only knew what you’d encountered by the permanent wasteland left behind, all that was left after, in such a rush, he’d sucked up that amazing burst of life. I wished I had not remembered that.
I went next door and knocked. I asked the woman who answered if she had a forwarding address for her erstwhile neighbours. She was stocky, forthright, and middle-aged: her leg was grossly swollen and wrapped in loose bandages. She wore slippers.
‘Thank God they’ve gone,’ she said, as if she spent her days waiting for the enquiry. ‘At last a little peace and quiet! All those people forever knocking at her door, all thinking they were going to be healed, that nothing would hurt any more: That woman was no healer. I took my leg to her and I’ll swear it made it worse. But try telling that to them. They believe what they want to believe.’
‘You don’t know where she went?’
‘She ran off with a BMW salesman, so they say. Just up and left one day. The nice one, the one with the children, left soon after. I did hear she’d moved around the corner into Mafeking Street. I can’t think why. It’s much the same as here. I don’t know what number; I don’t go out much. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.’ She lied. She was not at all sorry, but she was obviously in pain and Eleanor Darcy had failed her, so I forgave her.
I found my way to Mafeking Street, some half a mile distant. I was conscious that had I done my research for Lover at the Gate with any integrity I would know the street intimately. But I had not done so. I have relied on my intuition: that is to say I was not going to waste time on facts while Hugo was in my bed and Eleanor Darcy in my imagination. I was relieved to see that the street was exactly as I had imagined it. I came into it halfway along its length, where it was bisected by Union Street. It was a long road of semidetached houses, two up, two down, most in desultory repair, many lace-curtained, some, although small to begin with, converted into flats. Few of the cars which lined both sides of the street were new: most were clean and better kept than the houses; quite a few the kind that young men like to tinker with, to keep on the road in the face of all odds. I could see a couple of motorbikes; a clutch of bicycles leaning against a fence: a group of children, a couple of black faces amongst them, playing ball in the road, able to do so because this was a street which was a throughway to nowhere: on the corner where I stood was an Asian newsagent—it was empty of customers; closed until evening, no doubt, when the employed would begin to drift home from work. People of no aspiration could live here all their lives, and women married to men without aspiration, and I supposed vice versa, and forget easily enough that there was anything to aspire to.
I stood unsure of what I was looking for. Perhaps I hoped to find Brenda out walking with the children, or to run into Eleanor Darcy herself. Perhaps, I thought, if I knocked on another door someone would help. I had come a long way to go home with no reward. I wondered which way to walk, but both ways seemed equal. I started to go west, but the same sun which shone on deserts and mountains, baked the wide steps of city halls, glazed the air in gracious parks, shone into my eyes in Mafeking Street and dazzled me. So I turned my back on it and went east, and in the shadowed end of the street saw movement, people clustering in groups, and I was both disconcerted and pleased, because there seemed more of them than the houses around could possibly disgorge, and because here at last was a sense of event, of gathering together, of something about to happen. A minibus passed me by, and a coach. I walked towards the source of activity: there were men, women and children here. Why were they not at work, not at school? What was so important that kept them away? They were of all races, all classes: the kempt and the unkempt, the rich and the poor, but mostly those in between. They were devout, I could tell that—something mysterious and important was going on here—but not the black-shawled devout who all over the world mourn and murmur at shrines and pray for forgiveness: a sous-surrous of grief and reproach to rise to heaven: no, they were the kind who have library tickets in their wallets and cinema stubs in their pockets, and they are a multitude, stronger than they know.
I saw that they were waiting to go into a house, rather larger than the other ones in the road, and detached, which had been turned into a meeting hall. Outside was a wooden boarding, and on it was painted the words ‘The Darcian Chapel (16), Mafeking Street Branch’, and underneath that a poster, on which, handwritten, was the inscription ‘Today’s meeting: 4 p.m. Pastor: Hugo Vansitart. Subject: The Fiscal and the Self.’ I stood and stared at it, trying to take this remarkable sight in, and while I stared a Rolls-Royce pulled up, chauffeur driven. The door opened and Hugo stepped out: he wore a grey suit and a crimson cravat. Many in the crowd, I had noticed, wore just such crimson scarves. Hugo did not see me. I was one of many, and glad, at least for the moment, to remain so. He went into the chapel: the crowd followed, jostling, joking, their faces eager with expectation. No sombre religion this.
I stood at the back of the chapel and listened. I wondered if I should make myself known to Hugo, after the service, but thought I would not. I could not afford to have so much life force stirred up in me again. I would not survive it. And perhaps nothing at all would be stirred up in him. I could not face that.
Around me people chanted. They sang some kind of hymn to Utopia: there were no word sheets, but no hesitation in the singing either. It was a variation, from the sound of it, of the old Fabian hymn ‘Earth Shall be Fair, and All Men Glad and Wise’. The Darcian Movement had, I supposed, been going for some time, Hugo its founder member, this branch the sixteenth of how many? A religion for the new world, already thriving, unnoticed by those who ought to do the noticing—myself, and my agitated, agitating colleagues.
Age after age our tragic empires rise,
Built while we sleep
And in that sleeping dream …
And where was Eleanor Darcy? Was she here in the spirit? Did Hugo truly believe? I thought yes, he probably did. The Rolls-Royce was not necessarily a symbol of ostentation, merely that he needed to travel comfortably in order to preach the better.
Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep
Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise.
Men to incorporate women, of course. The greater to include the lesser. How could you ever tell when Eleanor Darcy was joking, or when she was serious? Babies aborted compulsorily in the womb! If she heard a voice on that one, it came from either the Devil or a God so rational as to be one and the same. I struggled with my scepticism. How wonderful, how easy, to believe. If only I could.
The hymn was finished. Hugo spoke.
‘Sisters and brothers,’ he said, ‘in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and was made flesh and dwelt among us, and of her fullness we have all received, and of her grace. And we asked her, what art thou? Prophet? And she replied I am the daughter of music, and the spouse of the wise, and I bring a new light into the world, of the world and for the world, that there shall be no heaven but here on earth—and that if you keep my commandments this heaven, this Utopia, shall be yours.’
No, I thought. I can’t. I want to but I can’t. I know too much. Eleanor didn’t issue commandments. Hugo has put them in. I have done my bit. She can’t ask any more of me. I slipped out. I closed the door behind me. I turned to walk to the corner where I had left my car. A movement in the back of the Rolls-Royce caught my eye. The window was open. I looked inside. Leaning back in the far corner was an attractive woman: she was buffing her fingernails. She moved forward, but I could not recognize who it was, though I saw her face clearly, if briefly. I didn’t want to appear inquisitive, so I walked on, found the car, and drove home. Afterwards I thought, but that was Eleanor Darcy; or at any rate, I couldn’t say it wasn’t Eleanor Darcy. I puzzled about it, but not very hard, or for very long. I thought she would approve of that.
I could not become uncritical; I could not ever come to worship and adore Eleanor Darcy as Hugo did, but I could sure as hell admire her spirit.
About the Author
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.
Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.