LOVER AT THE GATE [9]
Eleanor entertains
ELEANOR BROUGHT HABITS OF economy with her from her life as Ellen Parkin: she brought them into Georgina Darcy’s bed, changing the sheets from user-unfriendly linen to easy-care Terylene: she brought them to Georgina Darcy’s table, eating with Habitat cutlery not Darcy family silver, on the grounds that the latter wasted staff time in the cleaning. Julian would be offered Cheddar not Stilton at the end of dinner. Stale bread was used up, not thrown to the ducks on the moat that half ringed Bridport Lodge. The face that stared out from Georgina’s bathroom mirror, marble-set, made do with a smear of Oil of Ulay, not, as had Georgina’s, layer after layer of creams and unguents, one for the eye zone, one for the lip line, others for cheeks and chin. Eleanor was not too proud to use up what Georgina left, in this respect as in all others, but once the pots were empty chucked them out and did not replace them.
And Julian Darcy didn’t mind one bit. Eleanor’s presence in the bed outweighed the cheapness of the sheets, her company at the table was more reassuring than his family’s silver: the Cheddar, she assured him, was healthier than Stilton (by which he knew she meant cheaper) and he said he did not care about the state of her complexion, he had more important things to think about.
Eleanor told four of the six staff at the lodge that they were redundant to her needs, and so they were. These were Mrs Kneely, Mrs Foster, Edward the under gardener and Joan Baxter who came in to do the laundry. These four members of staff were the ones most visibly distressed and startled by Eleanor’s sudden appearance in their midst; the ones who tittle-tattled in the town: who admitted to signing a letter of condolence and support, drawn up by Joan Baxter and posted off to Georgina before Eleanor could intercept it; who somehow or other never managed to make the marital bed, either because of the new sheets or the behaviour of those who now slept in it. It was a better bed, however.
‘It seems that only married Vice Chancellors get their beds made properly,’ observed Julian. ‘When they live in sin they don’t.’ It was Eleanor’s custom to make a bed by straightening a sheet and flinging a duvet. Julian was accustomed to blankets, in the old-fashioned style, tucked and tidied. But who, as Eleanor enquired, could make love properly under tucked blankets? It was absurd.
Julian received letters from his children: Julia, twenty-five, and Piers, aged twenty-two. Both said they would never see their father again, he had treated their mother so disgracefully, and would never accept a penny from him.
Julian said, ‘My children have treated me disgracefully; they have brought humiliation upon me. Julia dropped out of a promising academic career to be a nurse. Piers never gets up before two in the afternoon. Why do they think I want to see them again? I don’t.’
Brenda brought news that the black magic group had been disbanded, and Nerina was to be married in a Muslim ceremony to her brother’s best friend, and no longer went to college. Brenda’s husband Pete had, at Brenda’s insistence, made representation to the academic authorities about the sacrificing of a goat on college property. The RSPCA had been called in. There had been a terrible scandal. The media communications course had been re-evaluated. Hadn’t Eleanor read about it?
‘I’m kind of cut off here at the university,’ said Eleanor. ‘I can never work out which is the real world and which isn’t. But I’m very happy with Julian. That’s all I need to know.’
‘Don’t you even think about Bernard?’
‘I can’t say I do,’ said Eleanor. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’
Brenda said she felt rather the same about her baby. She’d left baby and pushchair behind in the supermarket queue and gone home without them, quite forgetting, but she’d had the baby under a year and Eleanor had been married for fifteen years.
‘That was Ellen,’ said Eleanor. ‘I have been re-born. Risen guilt free as Eleanor from the ashes of the past. Do you think Nerina is continuing her black magic from home?’
Brenda said, from the sound of it, it was perfectly possible. Bernard was still in a bad way: clinically depressed, many reckoned.
‘Won’t Nerina get into trouble for not being a virgin?’ asked Eleanor.
Brenda said she thought there were spells to see to that kind of thing; failing that, cosmetic surgery could put it right. There were local doctors who specialized in it. What did Eleanor do all day?
‘I keep very busy,’ said Eleanor. ‘Julian is giving me a crash course in monetary theory: we mean to write a book together. And there is a local trouble here we have to sort out.’
Eleanor wrote to the emoluments committee declaring that she had reduced the running costs of Bridport Lodge by forty-two per cent, producing figures to prove it, and when it came to difficult and embarrassing votes at Convocation, Senate and Academic Board level, as to whether or not Professor Darcy could be seen to be in his right mind, it was this document that swung the feeling of the various meetings in his favour. Men fall in love: it was their right to do so. To be open about these matters was clearly in the mood of new university thinking, thrusting and energetic, and the various governing bodies did what they could to adjust themselves gracefully. Even when Eleanor enrolled as an undergraduate to do a degree course in economics they did not flinch. And so eventually Professor Darcy’s stock rose, not fell, at the University of Bridport, thanks to his wife leaving him and him taking in, to share his bed and board, and publicity, a young woman half his age, already married to another.
As for Georgina, she went to live with her daughter, and said she wouldn’t take a penny from Julian. Nor did she try to sue him for possession of the matrimonial home—although, as Eleanor pointed out, the house went with Julian’s job, so she wouldn’t have stood much of a chance anyway. She showed little interest in reclaiming her clothes, jewellery, or personal effects. Georgina made it generally known that anyway she’d had it up to here with university life in general and Julian in particular: no one was to make a fuss. The first response antagonized the academic community, who felt as a result more kindly disposed towards Eleanor than they otherwise would: the second eased Julian of guilt.
One morning, as Eleanor and Julian sat at the polished mahogany breakfast table, sipping coffee, and spreading toast made with white sliced bread and Marks & Spencer marmalade, and looking out over the Dorset hills, to the glimpse of sea beyond, Eleanor wearing an Edwardian silk wrap from Oxfam and Julian in a dressing gown inherited from his father—both his parents, perhaps fortunately, for they were the most respectable folk and divorce unknown in the family, were deceased—Julian said, ‘Eleanor, what preparations have you made for the graduation ceremonies?’ and Eleanor said, ‘Why, are they very special?’ And Julian said, ‘Well, actually yes, they are the high spot in the annual university calendar. There are graduation dinners—we hold them here—garden parties in the grounds, teas likewise, concert suppers, around two hundred at each, I suppose; honour graduands to be fêted and so on. Georgina spent quite a lot of time and energy doing it.’
‘I think the university office should do it,’ said Eleanor.
‘Well, no,’ said Julian, quite firmly, and she saw for the first time the glint in his eye which unnerved governments and faculty boards. ‘I think it is your job. You could get in outside caterers,’ he added, and from an untidy drawer drew an untidy file, in spite of which untidiness he laid his hand unerringly upon the card he sought: ‘Highlife Caterers—Academic Functions a Speciality.’
Eleanor said, ‘Caterers are a wicked waste of money. I’ll do it myself.’
Word got round college and university that Ellen Parkin was going—to do the Graduation Week catering single-handed and many predicted her downfall. There would be poached egg on toast for tea, they said, instead of salmon canapés with caviar; Irish stew for dinner instead of filet mignon: bread and butter pudding for dessert and sweet sherry all round. There was glee at the prospect. Julian Darcy would realize his mistake and Eleanor would be out on her ear and plain Ellen again, and serve her right. A man who got rid of one woman would get rid of another. And would Bernard take her back? No one knew. No one had seen Bernard lately: his name no longer appeared on the college’s staff list. They assumed they’d know if he was dead, but no one much cared.
Bernard was in fact quite often seen by Eleanor and Julian. He would stand on the gravel drive in front of Bridport Lodge in the very early morning, unshaven and unkempt, staring up at their bedroom window. When he knew he had been seen he would slink away.
‘If only we had dogs,’ said Julian, ‘we could set them on him. Would you like a dog, Eleanor?’
Eleanor said no, she was not a doggie sort of person. Julian said he was glad: Georgina Darcy had been. Georgina was spoken of, when at all, in the past tense. Bernard, in some respect still unfinished business, was at least accorded an existence in the present.
Liese and Leonard came to dine with Julian and Eleanor. Liese had abandoned her principles and now wore a fur coat, and Leonard made up in funny stories anything he lacked in a capacity for abstract thought.
Eleanor went out to the pantry to bring in the trifle the maid had left before going off duty. Liese followed her.
‘Eleanor,’ said Liese, ‘don’t you care any more what’s going on in Mafeking Street?’
‘No,’ said Eleanor.
‘Bernard’s had to move out of No. 93. The mortgage company have repossessed it. And he’s moved in with your father Ken and his girlfriend Gillian.’
‘Gillian? Ken was living with Gillian’s mother.’
‘She’s moved out.’
‘No wonder I have amnesia,’ said Eleanor, and dropped the glass bowl of trifle. It broke. She and Liese scooped what was eatable into a plastic bowl, rearranged it, and served it. Eleanor was the only one who cut her mouth on a sliver of glass. The sight and taste of her own blood falling on to whipped cream recalled the memory of snow, and the snowman which represented Bernard.
The next morning she called him, at Ken’s. The bill, she was glad to note, had been paid.
‘Bernard,’ she said, ‘is No. 93 up for sale?’
‘It has been for three months,’ he said. ‘Now the mortgage company own it. It wouldn’t sell because it was haunted.’
‘Only a tiny bit haunted,’ said Ellen. ‘Only by my mother.’
‘It got worse after you left,’ he said. ‘The estate agents said when people came to look over it they’d see things on the stairs, and smell dry rot, though the surveyors couldn’t find any. How are you? Why do you keep sending these divorce petitions through the post? You know I’m a Catholic.’
Eleanor said she’d better come over and see him, and her father, and her father’s new girlfriend.
‘She’s not new,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s been going on for years. She’s much too good for him.’
Ken’s fingers had become arthritic and he could no longer play the banjo. Gillian had a back problem and a cataract in one eye, surprising in one so young, but Bernard said the depletion of the ozone layer and the consequent increase in ultraviolet light was causing an epidemic of cataracts. It was not a cheerful household.
Bernard said along with everything else the curse of invisibility had been put on him. He existed but did not exist. People looked through him in the street, in shops. He might as well be a little old lady for all the notice anyone took of him.
‘Bernard,’ said Eleanor, ‘you are very visible to me and Julian when you stand outside our window. I wish you wouldn’t. It does no one any good.’
‘It does me some good,’ said Bernard, and smiled. He had shaved.
He was looking a little less pale and thin. Gillian was a good cook, he said, considering her one eye. She was better than Eleanor had ever been.
‘I never set out to be a good cook,’ said Eleanor.
Ken said, ‘The trouble with you, Apricot, is that you take after your mother. Unstable.’
Eleanor said to Ken, ‘The trouble with me is that I like men twice my age, the same way you like girls half your age.’
Gillian said, ‘It’s tea time!’, and sat them all down to scones, cream and jam, and chocolate cake served on rather dirty plates and tea from a grimy teapot. It seemed her one eye enabled her to cook, though not to pick up Ken’s scattered tissues from the floor, or tidy away Bernard’s many combs. But perhaps she didn’t see it as her business so to do. The combs were all matted: Bernard seemed to be losing his hair. Gillian was a stolid girl, with a pasty face and thick lips. She had pale blue, rather prominent eyes, one very cloudy.
‘You’re going bald,’ said Eleanor to Bernard.
‘It’s that curse,’ said Gillian. ‘That black magic group they set up at the college. They’ve really got it in for poor Bernard. They mean him to lose everything. You were only part of it. It’s not official now but it still goes on.’
Ken said all women were the same, they were all gullible; if Rhoda hadn’t spent all his savings on a quack faith healer he wouldn’t be in this state now.
Eleanor held her tongue and ate some more chocolate cake.
Bernard said, ‘Ellen doesn’t believe in black magic any more than the Marxist dialectic, any more than she did Catholicism. Ellen won’t let anyone believe in anything, except her. Ellen is the new religion.’
Eleanor said, ‘They weren’t really trying to raise the Devil, according to Jed. They were trying to create an optimum environment for an experiment in mass suggestion.’
Bernard said, ‘Jed was trying to create an optimum environment to seduce girl students. Yet he flourishes like the bay green tree.’
Eleanor said, ‘His baby died,’ and Bernard said, ‘That’s flourishing,’ and Gillian said she’d make him wash his mouth out with soapy water and Ken said so far as he could see there wasn’t any soap: there hadn’t been for weeks.
Bernard said, ‘I say what I want. That group of Jed’s ruined me and what’s more it raised the Devil. I saw him. He was floating outside my window, on the second floor. It is not something I care to remember.’
Gillian said, ‘Have some more chocolate cake. I’m sorry I was nasty. It was only a dream, Bernard. He’s been in a bad way, Ellen.’
Bernard said, ‘Dreams are something you wake up from. This was not a dream. It was real. I didn’t wake up from it. He was real. The Devil is real. He has a mouth with flabby black lips and slit eyes like a goat: they glow like a dog’s eyes do in the dark but it wasn’t dark, it was still light. His breath smelt sickly sweet, like dry rot. His skin was scaly and hairy. His edges were a bit blurred but he was real. He was floating, not standing: the ground was too far beneath him for him to be standing, unless he was totally out of proportion, which I suppose is possible. Then he faded away. It wasn’t that I woke up but that he faded out. Except of course he’s still there. Just because you can’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t, Bernard,’ said Gillian. ‘You upset yourself. He came home and gibbered for weeks, Ellen, and never went into college again. Now we’re all on benefits.’
‘Just as well,’ said Ken. ‘He was making a fool of himself; he should have resigned before he was fired. They gave him every opportunity, but you know our Bernard.’
They were very cosy together. Eleanor felt excluded.
Eleanor said, ‘So you won’t be standing outside our window any more, Bernard?’
Bernard said, ‘Oh yes I shall. I have nothing else to do. No car to drive, no job to go to, no hair to comb, no friends, no visibility; I reserve the right to stand beneath my wife’s window and fart while she makes a fool of herself having sex with a buggering old fascist.’
After a little while Eleanor said, ‘Ex-wife’s window, if you’d only sign the divorce papers. It might make you feel better.’
‘Wife,’ said Bernard. ‘Catholics do not believe in divorce.’
‘So you’re back in the faith,’ said Eleanor, coolly and politely. ‘After all that! I couldn’t believe it.’
‘Yes,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s safer. I keep my nose to the ground, think what I’m told, obey the rules, and go to Mass on Sundays. I have been punished for the sin of intellectual arrogance; God has demonstrated to me that the ecstasy of pure thought is reserved for heaven, not for earth; it is for angels, not for man. No, virtue lies in obedience; I will never teach again: it is a sin to interfere with the simple belief structures of innocent students—’
‘Let alone their bodies,’ said Ken, who as he grew older seemed to grow simpler. ‘Heh, heh, heh!’
‘And if I stick to all this,’ said Bernard, ignoring him, ‘my belief is that at least I won’t see the Devil in the flesh again, and that’s just about the height of my ambition. I’ve learned my lesson.’
‘Superstition,’ said Eleanor, ‘will get you nowhere. Shall we change the subject? How’s poor Prune?’
Gillian said, ‘Who’s Prune?’
Eleanor said, ‘Poor Prune is Jed’s wife. We all used to be quite close: not any longer. Jed had an affair with Nerina, but Nerina never liked anyone mentioning it. Now more than ever, I expect, since she’s married.’
Bernard clutched his stomach and said he had a bad pain, as if a needle was being driven into it. Ken said he wasn’t taking Bernard up to the hospital yet again, Bernard needn’t think he was. Gillian wept—equally out of both eyes, Eleanor was interested to see.
Eleanor said, ‘Well, I must be off. Have you ever thought of taking up catering, Gillian? The chocolate cake was wonderful!’ Gillian said tearfully she couldn’t say she had. Eleanor said perhaps now Gillian was part of the family she’d like to help her out in a little something she’d said she’d do up at the university, and Gillian said okay, anything to get away from this dreary lot. What she couldn’t stand was ill health, especially if it was mental.
Valerie sits up in bed and listens to tape
Q: WILL THERE BE political censorship in Darcy’s Utopia?
A: Of course not. Why should there be? If anyone can think of any better way to organize things, let them say so: if they can get ten people to agree with them, let them put it to our parliament of popular folk (leavened, if you remember, with a few obvious and self-declared baddies) and everything will be done to accommodate them. It will be government by consensus, not confrontation: government not by power seekers, for where will be the advantages of power since not money, but diversion, and the pleasurable exercise of skill will be the reward of work? Government not by robber barons, for what can they rob that will be of value to them that others cannot have by simply stretching out the hand? But by those who like to see things running smoothly, and who will be able to disinvest themselves of a block of Community Units on the day they resign—the exact amount subject to popular vote. There will be no censors and, as we know, very few policemen, though sufficient well-meaning and officious folk, no doubt, to organize the short-term or long-term exile of those people others simply cannot stand.
Q: You mean to be unlikeable will be a crime?
A: Put it like that if you must. ‘Unlikeable’ in the sense of ‘antisocial’. There will be no obligation to chatter and smile, if that’s what you mean; though I hope many will feel like doing so.
Q: How large is Darcy’s Utopia? It seems, if you’ll forgive me saying so, an airy-fairy kind of place. A city of dreams, with glittering spires and no reality.
A: I suspect initially about two million people. Any larger unit will be hard to organize: we depend so greatly in our existing societies upon the accumulated traditions of the past, on the habits of custom and practice, built up to our disadvantage through history, to regulate ourselves and our behaviour. And in Darcy’s Utopia we have to start again, rethink everything, from how and why we brush our teeth to how and why we bury our dead; we must do this in the light of our new knowledge of our inner world, and our new technological control over the outer one, and we must do it by consensus. Any smaller unit and the rest of the world will say oh, it only works because it’s so small, it has no relevance here.
Q: I see. The rest of the world is watching, is going to follow suit?
A: Of course. We start small, and little by little the boundaries of Darcy’s Utopia will expand. Our only problem in the end will be there’ll be nowhere to send the exiles to, but I don’t suppose we have to worry about that for a while.
Q: Supposing it doesn’t work?
A: Supposing, supposing. It may not work. But nothing else is going to be working, not for long. Look around. The poor and the dispossessed, forget the lover, are at the gate. The third world spills over into the first, the second. Your guilt will not let you be happy or at peace. The oceans warm up: the very air gets hard to breathe. So let the community of nations try it: let Europe set aside the land: let two million with a common language and a common will there congregate. Let Europe feed, house and clothe them for five years, while they get their high-technology, low-consuming, recycling act together. Europe feeds, houses and clothes its refugees: let them do it to some purpose: let us find our blueprint for the future, our multiracial, unicultural, secular society: let us locate it in the real world.
Q: Why Europe?
A: Who else is ready for the shock of the new? And because Darcy’s Utopia is built upon the resonances, if you’ll forgive me being so pompous, of the Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition: that life should be of meaning here on earth, not just bungled through any old how in the expectation of life hereafter.
Q: There is no life hereafter?
A: I’m not saying that, another motto of Darcy’s Utopia being ‘let’s have our cake and eat it too’. But you’re distracting me from practicalities. The State of Israel was created by international consensus: why not Darcy’s Utopia?
Q: An unfortunate analogy. Look what happened there!
A: We don’t know yet what happened there. And as I have told you, you must refrain from believing you will learn lessons from history. Nothing now is exactly the same as anything then. Apart from anything else Darcy’s Utopia will be surrounded by friends, not enemies. The only thing to assault it will be a flood of ideas, suggestions, recommendations; which will be difficult to fight off, because the hope of the world goes with them, and there is a terrific energy in that, you may be sure.
Q: There will be no tourists?
A: There will be no tourists. Frankly, there won’t be much to see, there being no history to Darcy’s Utopia—no roots, and none sought. But there will be celebrations, feast days. Did I tell you how, when I was first with Julian Darcy, before he became known as Rasputin and myself as the Bride of Rasputin, I organized and catered for all the Graduation Week ceremonies at the University of Bridport? It all worked wonderfully well. Friends and relatives turned up to help. The sun shone. There were strawberries and cream, and champagne at the garden parties. We had guests to stay at the lodge—a couple of other Vice Chancellors plus wives—and they were easy with me, not condemning at all. I had expected some hostility, since they were accustomed to Georgina, not myself, at the table, but none was apparent. Mind you, Julian was then one of the most important and influential men in the Joint University Convocation. That might have had something to do with it. He had the ear of the government, of the Secretary of State himself; no one wanted to believe his judgement could be suspect. The myth was that Julian knew what he was doing. The smooth running of Graduation Week seemed to prove it. If the sun shines, and there is champagne, strawberries and cream for tea, who can doubt it? Later, of course, when Julian was being prosecuted for evasion and misuse of public funds, the champagne, strawberries and cream were held against him. It was seen as gross extravagance at a time when he knew, or should have known, that the university was in acute financial difficulties. It was alleged, quite wrongly, that I had thirty pairs of shoes in my wardrobe. Some photographer got in and took pictures of them. ‘Luxury and extravagance at Bridport’ went the caption. When husbands fall from power, the number of shoes in the wife’s wardrobe are always a source of marvel, shock and abhorrence. In actual fact most of the shoes were Georgina’s—too good to throw away, too big and boring for me to wear. She had really big horsy feet.
Q: There was always an undercurrent of feeling at the time of the trial that your husband had been framed. That some people were out to get him. Can you comment on that?
A: Of course they were. Everyone was out to get him. The government took on Julian’s proposals for a radical rethinking of fiscal policy, but compromised at the last moment with the traditionalists: the nation got the worst of all worlds, instead of the best. Inflation took off, but not the hyper-inflation Julian and I were seeking. The myth that was Julian crumpled: the rumbling discontent in the university over the question of Georgina and myself could no longer be held down: the Board of Governors discovered flaws in the accountancy system and declared the university bankrupt. Criminal proceedings against Julian followed. You might almost think, if you were superstitious, that the curse which fell upon Bernard fell upon Julian too. That is enough for today. Thank you.
Brenda’s letter to Hugo
DEAR MR VANSITART,
I don’t get a chance to get a word in edgeways when you and Apricot are talking. She’s still just Apricot to Belinda and Liese and me. We’ve seen her through her Ellen years and her Eleanor years, though sometimes, I don’t mind telling you, our patience has worn a little thin, and her recent experiences haven’t seemed to calm her down one bit.
Jack the bellboy had brought the letter, addressed to Hugo, up to Room 301. Hugo wasn’t there. Jack offered to take the envelope down to room service and steam it open. Valerie accepted the offer, recognizing a woman’s hand.
She is now talking of buying a new car, a BMW, and the man from the garage calls her Alison—always a sign that she’s about to be off. I’ll be sorry when she goes. I know I’m just the one in Apricot’s life who brings in the coffee and takes the clothes to the cleaners—but all the same she brings a kind of light with her, and what she has to say is interesting: there’s a lot in it, though it’s sometimes hard to tell when she’s joking and when she isn’t.
I’m writing because I want to put my point of view. I take this business of Utopia seriously, and I want you to do the same. Not Darcy’s Utopia; that’s Apricot’s crazy vision: but let’s say Brenda’s Utopia, a kind of toned-down version of Apricot’s. I want a world fit for my kids to grow up in. Look, I want a world fit for me to grow up in. I don’t want us to go back to anything, I want us to go forward to something. I want to believe that my daily life has a purpose which is more than just me. I used to be a real peacenik during the crazy time when we all thought we’d be pulverized by nuclear war, that the future was just rubble. I’d stand around in the town square with banners, with a lot of chalk marks on the ground for bodies, scaring everyone; saying if we don’t do something we’ll all be dead. And that really kept me going, believing I was right and everyone else was wrong. In fact the more wrong I could make them be, the more right I’d be. Those days, in retrospect, were dead easy. It was dead easy. Then Gorbachev came along and swept the ground from under our feet: and it began to look as if we had a future after all, but if so, what was it going to be? And we hadn’t got a thing worked out, not a thing. Down here in the outer suburbs we just sort of stand about, dazed, trying to make a living, and having babies (if you’re me) because it’s the only positive single thing we can think of to do, and even that’s suspect because the world can’t stand the weight of its population any more. Who can you work for who isn’t corrupt? Where can you go to get out of a climate of lies and hypocrisy? I want to rebuild the world, and I’m stumped as to how to do it: but at least Apricot is trying. When you write your articles don’t laugh her out of court completely. And a word of warning—though I suspect it’s too late—people who have anything to do with Apricot do seem to keep getting into emotional muddles: she’s a love-and-muddle carrier, the way some people are typhoid carriers. I’m inoculated from it, by virtue of general running exhaustion, I daresay, and the effort of trying to make ends meet can de-sex a girl fast. I do worry sometimes about Pete. Now he’s a mini-cab driver, he meets so many new people, women out shopping with money to spare and a whole lot of them are going to be better-looking and more lively and better conversationalists than me. And we do, the three of us, sit down to supper in the evening. Though perhaps Pete is safer on the road than he ever was at the poly. That place was a hotbed. I was relieved when Pete was made redundant; the shock waves from the closure of the media communications department just kept on coming. Jed was the only one who seemed to survive. I’m just saying beware: keep your hands on the steering wheel, your eyes on the road. The fever goes when Apricot departs, and you can be left in an awful mess. That’s all for now. With best wishes,
Brenda Steele
Valerie had some trouble finding matches to burn Brenda’s letter; she went down to the hotel bar for the first time, ordered a drink and purloined a cigarette lighter; returned to 301, used the bathroom basin as a grate, and put the ashes down the WC.
LOVER AT THE GATE [10]
Julian overdoes it
IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER Graduation Week that Julian turned to Eleanor and said, ‘That went very well, my dear. Surprisingly well, in fact. Do you think we should be married as soon as my divorce comes through?’
Eleanor said, ‘I think that would be a very good idea indeed, Julian.’
‘You’re not,’ he said, ‘by any chance actually married to your Bernard? I take it you tied no formal knot?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ said Eleanor. ‘He was a Catholic and I wasn’t. Marriage was out of the question.’
‘More fool Bernard,’ said Julian. ‘You are everything a man could want, even a man such as me. How wonderful it is when a clever, competent and organizing head sits upon a body as young and supple and glamorous as yours.’
They went through a quiet marriage ceremony when Julian’s divorce came through. Eleanor said she wanted no big splash; she saw it just as the tying up of loose ends.
‘You didn’t ask me,’ said Brenda, ‘and I’m not surprised, considering, just a little hurt. So you’ve actually done it. Little Apricot Smith has turned into Eleanor Darcy and has the ear of the most powerful man in the kingdom and can murmur into it whatever she likes, any time, albeit bigamously.’
‘Well,’ said Eleanor, ‘at some times of day and all times of night.’
‘And Julian is in good moral, physical and mental health?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Eleanor. She was arranging flowers in a crystal bowl. She had a real gift for it. Sun streamed in through open windows. Soon it would be time for the coming year’s Graduation Week ceremonies. This time round she would not ask her friends to help out. There had been some comment on the standard of waitressing. A one-eyed girl behind the teapot was not, she had come to realize, what proud parents wished to see. They wanted the occasion unblemished by thoughts of the real world, from which their children were this very day escaping.
Eleanor was not speaking the exact truth to Brenda. Julian’s heart kept missing a beat. He was doing too much. The campus doctor told him it was stress: the condition was usual enough, not damaging to the heart, but a sign perhaps that he should slow down a little.
‘Of course, you’ve got a young wife,’ he said, jokingly. ‘I’ve known that carry off many a man in his prime.’
Julian reported the conversation to Eleanor.
‘What a very old-fashioned doctor,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the campus doctor of a young thrusting university should have a young thrusting attitude to life, and be rather better informed. Research shows the more sex you have, the healthier you are.’
Julian startled her by asking to see chapter and verse of the research. Every now and then she forgot and thought she was still married to Bernard. She found some published research which at least said that sexually active men were twenty per cent less prone to heart attack than the sexually inactive. Julian said twenty per cent wasn’t very reassuring. To avoid temptation he would sleep in a spare room for a day or two.
‘It’s not that I don’t want you,’ he said to Eleanor, ‘it’s that I daren’t. And I have a convocation in the morning; a faculty lunch, and golf with John Hersey of the polytechnic in the afternoon. We have to get a few things settled in the trans-binary field. And of course Downing Street next Wednesday, and an article on the Europeanization of the pound sterling still to be written.’
‘Julian,’ said Eleanor, ‘it occurs to me that things other than our sharing a bed make your heart miss a beat.’ But Julian found that hard to believe. If the heart misbehaves, the principle of Ockham’s razor suggests that affairs of the heart can only be to blame.
While Julian was at his convocation, Eleanor most civilly received a journalist from the Daily Mail. Normally, when the time for the three-monthly Downing Street meetings approached, no matter how they clustered, journalists would be kept from the door.
‘In matters of economic science,’ Julian would say, ‘the layman knows nothing, assumes much and fears more. All the press ever does is compound that ignorance, folly and fear; deliberately it fosters mistrust of change. Therefore, Eleanor, when faced with the ladies, gentlemen and guttersnipes of the media, let it be our policy to remain silent. Besides which, I’ve had murmurings in my ear in high places, and I can tell you this, mum is very much the word at the moment.’
In the high places of both government and academia, it seemed, messages came in the form of words in ears, little snippets fed out over dinner, or over the telephone from which the minds of those at the top of the pyramid of power could be construed by those further down. Eleanor would lie in bed watching Julian pull on his socks, with their thin little snappy red suspenders, and marvel at his villainous urbanity. He made her smile. She loved him. His mind rather than his haunches, which were, granted, a little flabby, turned her on. She always got up later than he did. She loved to watch and listen, and he loved his audience. He would go down to the kitchen and put on the coffee and toast: she would follow. The staff were not required to start work until 9.55 in the morning, thus allowing the happy couple their privacy. It meant the staff seldom finished until eleven at night, for every detail of the spontaneous breakfast must be prepared in advance, from time-setting the microwave for .25 of a minute at fifty per cent power to soften the butter; to grinding the coffee beans at the last possible moment to avoid any loss of flavour. Julian would be in his office by ten, relaxed, happy, accustomed to adoration, expecting more, and unworried by the necessity of making decisions, inasmuch as he knew they would be the right ones.
But now Julian’s heart had missed a beat, and he mistook the reason, and Eleanor was encouraged, and said to Freddie Howard of the Daily Mail, ‘Yes, by all means. I should be happy to be interviewed. If you believe that the home life of the Vice Chancellor of Bridport might be of interest to your readers, on your head be it. You’ll find us very dull, I’m afraid.’
Freddie Howard arrived at twelve in the morning. Eleanor wore black leggings and a silky top, which showed both legs and top to advantage. At that time she assumed a long-legged, supple, Jane Fonda look; hair plentiful and curly about the head. The spirit of Georgina still hovered about the house, as the spirit of first wives is wont to do, leaving some indefinable reproach behind, lurking in eggcups or under saucepan lids, and Eleanor took care to resemble her predecessor as little as possible the better to outwit her, exuding a young energy rather than a cool elegance. She offered him champagne and asked Mrs Dowkin to bring in ‘some of the caviar snacks, you know, the kind I love. I’m sure you will too.’ She ate at least a dozen of the piled biscuits when they arrived, her little even white teeth greedy—he ate two, one to try and the next to reaffirm he didn’t like true caviar at all: he preferred the lumpfish kind. He was a fleshy, saturnine man in his early forties, normally sent out on heartbreak stories. He was known to be good with women; they’d tell him anything.
‘I’m only a wife,’ Eleanor said, ‘and of course I’m not trained in economics. But economics is only a matter of common sense, isn’t it? I like to think I give Julian confidence—that’s the main thing.’ Freddie asked what she thought Julian’s advice to the PM would be, in this time of crisis.
‘Is there a crisis?’ asked Eleanor, calling for more champagne. ‘Down here at Bridport we don’t notice much. Yes, I believe the academic staff are on a work-to-rule, something about wages and inflation: but they’re never contented, are they? And they have such long holidays! Why can’t they do two jobs, if they’re short of money?’
‘Let them eat cake,’ murmured Freddie.
‘I never understood why poor Marie Antoinette got such stick for saying that,’ said Eleanor. ‘It seems a perfectly good suggestion to me, though cake’s not very good for you. Eggs, sugar, butter and so forth. Bread’s healthier, I agree. Of course,’ added Eleanor, ‘Julian’s salary is inflation linked, so inflation doesn’t affect us particularly. He got a hundred and twenty thousand pounds last year and a hundred and fifty this. Everyone should be really careful about their contracts, these days. I think if there’s a message he’d want to give everyone it would be this: “Watch your contract!”’
‘Now unemployment is surging up again, the workforce may find that difficult,’ observed Freddie, writing busily.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘Julian’s view is that money itself is the problem with the economy. Most people would be far better off with none at all.’
‘Do you have a pet name for him?’ asked Freddie.
‘I call him Rasputin,’ said Eleanor.
The photographer arrived, late and dusty, as press photographers normally do. He looked Eleanor up and down and said, ‘This is better. I thought it would have to be a desk-shot. Typical Vice Chancellor stuff. The best background you ever get in academia is an ivy wall.’
He posed her sitting perilously on the stone balcony, with the hills behind, and the breeze playing through her curly hair, head thrown back and long legs to advantage. ‘Oops!’ she kept crying as he kept snapping. ‘Nearly fell that time!’ Freddie went on pouring more champagne, and she went on pouring it over the wall but Freddie didn’t notice that. ‘Natural light!’ the photographer rejoiced. ‘Natural light and no ivy, no books. You’ve made my day.’
When Julian came home from playing golf he found Eleanor in tears. She said she’d let a journalist in—he’d pressured her and she’d somehow been manoeuvred into it—and she just knew he was going to make everything up; and a photographer had come along and snapped her as she sat on the wall playing ball with Mr Dowkin’s son.
‘Playing ball?’ enquired Julian. ‘Playing ball—?’
‘I do sometimes,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t know, Julian. You’re always in your office or running the world. And my legs were showing, I just know they were.’
‘Eleanor,’ said Julian, ‘this doesn’t sound like you.’
‘It’s because I’m so tired and miserable,’ she said. ‘If you’re not in my bed I can’t sleep. My judgement is all to pieces. I need you as much as you need me. How was golf?’
‘Bad,’ he said. ‘My heart was all over the place. The word from above is that trans-binary adjustments across the PCFC and UFC are out. They keep changing the goal posts. Now I doubt we’ll be able to asset-strip the polytechnic, even if they lie down and ask us to.’
‘I’ve never heard you put it quite like that before,’ said Eleanor, drying her tears, bored with those, as so was he. ‘You’ve talked about dual funding, incorporation, merger, maximization of resources, trans-binary unification across the field, but not asset-stripping. These things should never be put so crudely. This is academia, not the business world. If you don’t mind me saying so, I think not sleeping with me affects your judgement as much as it does mine.’
‘Eleanor,’ he said, ‘I think you’re right about everything.’
He returned to her bed forthwith and by the morning both his spirits and his judgement had returned. His heart still missed beats but he didn’t care. Eleanor handed him the Daily Mail, in silence. He studied it carefully. Eleanor was on the front page. ‘“Let them eat cake,” says leggy young bride of the new Rasputin.’ ‘You take a good photo,’ he said. ‘Rasputin? Do they mean me?’ He read on. ‘The upshot of this absurd piece,’ said Julian, eventually, ‘is that while the government dithers and listens to the outrageous advice of a maniac economic advisor, of dubious sexual morals, who lives in an ivory tower on champagne and caviar, the nation collapses further and further into economic crisis.’
‘A really vicious unfounded attack,’ said Eleanor. ‘They’ve even got my salary wrong. Thirty-five thousand pounds too low; and inflation has been evening out at fifteen, not twenty-two per cent. They can’t even do their sums.’
‘There’s the proof they made the whole thing up,’ said Eleanor. ‘Julian, I’d die if you thought I’d been indiscreet.’
‘My darling,’ said Julian, ‘whatever you do is okay by me. Just don’t leave my bed again or unfortunate things happen.’
‘Of course I won’t,’ she said. They embraced. Mrs Dowkin came in and asked Eleanor rather pointedly if she wanted more jars of caviar bought in. She was not above making trouble. Georgina, the real wife, the true Mrs Darcy, had she allowed herself to be photographed in the first place, which was doubtful, would have stood beside the family hearth, or by the big Chinese vase filled with flowers from the garden, not perched on a wall, all legs and hair. Julian looked at Eleanor rather shrewdly, she thought, but said nothing.
‘Get in some more,’ said Eleanor calmly, ‘but not too much. And some fish paste. We only had the caviar because the fish paste had run out. It was an unfortunate kind of day.’
‘Well,’ said Julian, putting down the Mail, taking up the Independent, ‘at least now we have nothing to lose,’ and went off to staff-management meetings to calm the uproar and assure the union delegates that the Mail article had been an unfair and unprovoked attack on himself and the government, based on lies, untruth, malice but, worst of all, ignorance.
Journalists thereafter gathered in considerable numbers outside Bridport Lodge, as well as outside 11 Downing Street, where the government’s economic think-tank was accustomed to assemble. Julian Darcy was henceforth known as Rasputin Darcy: Eleanor as Rasputin’s Bride. Everyone loved it. The academic staff settled for a twelve per cent rise, which in view of current inflation was seen as a considerable victory for management but did not cool tempers.