by Fay Weldon
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 sugg
estion 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.
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 D
arcy 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.
