Darcy's Utopia (21 page)

The pages
of Lover at the Gate
mounted steadily beside my printer. As the pile grew higher, so it seemed to me, little flickers of interest in the outside world returned. I both longed to finish it, yet dreaded the finishing. What then? When Eleanor had let me go, if Eleanor let me go, what then?

A
MONTH OR SO
later Prune’s baby was stillborn—one of those apparently perfect babies who turn out to have failed to develop a brain—and Bernard said, ‘Nerina’s group ill-wished it.’ Ellen said, ‘That’s absurd. It was conceived with a genetic defect: its handicap predated the insult to Nerina.’ Bernard said, ‘Well, perhaps black magic groups can predate curses. How do you know they can’t?’ and Ellen replied, ‘You should have been Witchfinder General. You’d have picked out and burned a thousand witches,’ and Bernard was upset and insulted, feeling she was seeing him as reactionary when everyone knew he was a radical, a feminist, a reconstructed man, liberal in outlook, tolerant in behaviour, his heart and mind firmly in the right place. Ellen and Bernard were not getting on too well. The phone had gone a couple of times lately and a man, with a gravelly, upper echelon civil service note to his voice, rather than the serviceable tones of the locality and the polytechnic, had asked for Eleanor, and Ellen had taken the call on the extension.

‘Who was that?’ Bernard asked, too proud to listen in to the call. ‘He’s a man offering me a job up at the university,’ said Ellen. ‘You know I had my name down at the agency for temping work. I think I’ll take it.’

‘Why does he call you Eleanor?’

‘I put Eleanor on the form. I thought I might get paid more as Eleanor than as Ellen.’

They needed the money. The Inland Revenue had discovered a mistake in their accounting: they were demanding six hundred and fifty pounds from Bernard forthwith, which he did not have. He had bought No. 93 from the landlord at a good price, but now dry rot had appeared in the porch, and if not seen to soon would damage the fabric of the house. Wendy’s ghost made a dramatic appearance again, knocking Ellen’s contraceptive pills off the mantelpiece: drifting around the bedroom in a kind of orange glow, Ellen was prepared to call in a priest to exorcize it but Bernard said drearily it was all too late, too late. Bernard’s white shirts had somehow got in with a pair of Ellen’s red socks and were now a pinkish grey. He hated to be so sloppily dressed. All misfortunes were blamed upon Nerina. Nerina would sit in class staring at him, Bernard said, her steady brown eyes, half-reproachful, half-triumphant, plotting further troubles for him, big and little stabs of revenge. He slept too much, not too little: he was too desolate, too anxious for lovemaking. The curse of depression lay upon him: Ellen suggested lithium, which does so much to calm the manic-depressive temperament, but Bernard said lithium was no defence against Nerina. Nerina had it in for him.

‘Bernard,’ said Ellen, ‘are you sure you didn’t make a pass at her? If you ask me, only excessive guilt would make you quite so fanciful. Though it’s better to have this Nerina blamed for your pink shirts rather than me. If she didn’t exist I would have to invent her.’

‘Of course I didn’t make a pass at Nerina,’ said Bernard. ‘That might be the trouble. Jed did. Jed’s the kind to bed his best friend’s wife if he thought he’d get away with it. Jed has just got a senior lectureship and won a five-hundred-pound premium bond, and poor Prune’s baby is dead.’

Julian Darcy did not believe in curses. Julian would just have looked startled, even indignant, had Ellen seemed for one moment to give any credence to the powers of black magic. Black magic was for the credulous, the ignorant, the uneducated. Julian moved amongst the powerful of the land: the thought behind the Conference: the mind behind the Act. Julian had a benign and cultivated air. Julian took a sip of claret here, a glass of Perrier there: Julian made a trip to 10 Downing Street: Julian went up to a shoot in Scotland: Julian and Georgina gave a dinner party and who was guest of honour but the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his wife. After dinner, Ellen asked, when the guests had gone, when the house was quiet, when the mind was stilled, what then? No, Julian and Georgina had long since given up sex. They were friends, good friends, no more.

Julian’s conversation, when not about the beauty of Eleanor’s body, the freshness of Eleanor’s mind, was about recession and government intercession, exchange rates, the International Monetary Fund, and occasionally what minister was sleeping with what actress, and who had behaved shoddily pre-privatization and which member of the Stock Exchange was going shortly to be nailed for malpractice. Julian didn’t worry about whether dry rot in the porch had been caused by a leaky gutter or a curse: he would simply curse the cheque that had it eradicated forthwith. Eleanor knew: now she worked in the Vice Chancellor’s office she made out his personal cheques. Julian was not business-like about his own finances: he would hand her tattered files stuffed with letters, bills and uncashed cheques, which he had found at the bottoms of drawers. She would divide them as best she could between university and personal, and hand over to Miss Richards in the faculty office whatever seemed relevant, and Julian would murmur into her ear, ‘Brilliant, brilliant: I am so
bad
at this kind of thing!’, and Eleanor would say, ‘You are a person on the grand scale, not a detail man at all,’ or some such thing, and he would seem to be relieved, as if a lifetime’s self-doubt had been lifted. She enjoyed making him happy. It was so easy. Georgina was perfect, he would say; he had to be as much on show if he got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of the night as he would receiving guests. He liked to shamble sometimes, he confessed. To belch, to burp, to fart. Georgina wouldn’t let him. Ellen purred over his imperfections; his belly, his broken tooth, the hairs in his nose. ‘I love you for what you aren’t,’ she’d say, ‘as much as for what you are.’

Julian’s wife Georgina came to call upon Julian at work one morning: strode in, tall and elegant, in pale, impeccable clothes. She was as coldly charming to Eleanor as no doubt she was to everyone of lower status—which, as Ellen confided in Bernard, must be almost the entire world—and would have gone straight through to see her husband but Eleanor said, ‘One moment, please, Mrs Darcy, I’ll just see if he’s free,’ so Georgina Darcy had to stand there until Eleanor said, ‘Professor Darcy can see you now. You may go through,’ which pleased Eleanor as much as Georgina Darcy’s cool nod had displeased her.

Bernard said, ‘Why do you always have to work so late?’ and Ellen said, ‘Because there’s so much to do,’ and so there was. Bernard said, ‘At least he’s not the kind to make passes at a secretary: not a secretary without a qualification to her name: beats me why he employed you.’ ‘Beats me,’ said Ellen, and Julian did, sometimes. She liked that.

He took her up to Bridport Lodge, the Vice Chancellor’s residence, a country house of elegant Georgian proportions, when Georgina was away visiting friends in Scotland—naturally she had friends in Scotland: that kind of person did, said Liese. Leonard went shooting grouse sometimes. He sold Rolls-Royces now. Liese confided he wasn’t the man she’d married. She was glad her father was dead: Leonard was a mass murderer of little birds. ‘I expect he has to do it for the contacts,’ said Ellen, but it didn’t comfort Liese. Ellen, Brenda and Belinda were a little pleased to see this cloud pass over their friend’s life. While Georgina was away, Eleanor fingered through the garments in Georgina’s walk-in wardrobe: it was full of good tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters. Eleanor picked through Georgina’s jewel case, which was neatly packed with pearls and stud earrings—and then Eleanor would spend the evening sporting on the antique brass bed between Georgina’s linen sheets. She thought perhaps Ellen would have behaved differently. But linen sheets! Of course, there were staff to iron them, paid for by the university. The staff were always about. Julian was too grand to notice their presence, or else it served his purpose that they should be present, witness to his and Eleanor’s passion. Sometimes Eleanor had the feeling that Julian was devious, more devious than she allowed. Vice Chancellors, she supposed, often were.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ Brenda asked Eleanor. She came up to the university office one morning, pushing her loaded pram up the hill. ‘Can’t you even keep it quiet? The whole town knows. The whole polytechnic knows. Everyone in the world knows except Bernard and Georgina, and eventually someone will break ranks and tell them too.’

‘Knows what?’ asked Eleanor. ‘What am I doing wrong?’

Brenda called Belinda and Belinda drove all the way to Bridport to see Eleanor. She came in a little Deux Chevaux. She and her husband had joined a religious group and now gave most of their money away to its leader. Her baby came too, in a carrycot on the back seat.

‘You don’t even seem to understand that what you’re doing is peculiar, Ellen. People have extramarital affairs in a hole-in-the-corner way. Not like this. You are throwing everything away. And Vice Chancellors of universities, especially with political connections, do not normally risk careers and marriage for the sake of someone like you.’

‘Then perhaps he’s mad,’ said Eleanor. ‘And I don’t see I’m throwing anything away. I’m having a really nice time, and I’d rather have a lover than a baby any day. If you ask me, it’s only women who can’t find lovers, who only have husbands, who have to make do with babies.’

Belinda’s baby dickered and fretted in her mother’s arms.

‘Well,’ said Belinda, ‘that puts me in my place,’ and Eleanor had to apologize. She did not wish to hurt her friend unnecessarily. But Belinda pulled out a very full breast and offered it to the baby. She had put on weight again.

‘Tell you what,’ Eleanor said, ‘I’ll speak to Bernard if that makes you feel any better.’

She did. She said to Bernard they’d agreed always to be honest with each other, and anyway he hadn’t married her properly, only at a civil ceremony which he hadn’t really acknowledged at the time, and out of pity, not love, and now she had found someone she really loved, who really loved her, whose interests coincided with hers, and so forth, and since they had no children she was free to follow the desires and devices of her own heart, surely, and so forth and so on, and what it amounted to, she was seeing and sleeping with another man, and it didn’t mean she and Bernard would have to split up, she needed time to discover if this was what she really wanted.

Bernard wept. She had hoped he would hit her, but all he did was sit there with tears running out of his eyes and snot running out of his nose. Julian would at least have reached for his handkerchief—and there would have been one to hand, crisp, white and laundered. Eleanor found Bernard a tissue and gave it to him. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘this kind of thing happens in marriages all the time.’

Then he asked her what he could do to make the marriage better, asked how had he failed her; he would do anything, anything, to keep her; and the more he grovelled the more she despised him: and yet she was surprised. She had not expected this. The old Bernard would not have behaved so: the moral high ground would automatically have been his. He was in some way denatured, and by no doing of hers. Was this what depression did to men?

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave me. They want you to leave me; it’s part of my punishment. I’m cursed, can’t you see it? Are you completely blind? First they destroy your car, then your wife leaves you: next you lose your friends and your job. You’ll see!’

Eleanor couldn’t bear it. She went and slept in the spare room. Bernard brought her a cup of tea in the morning and gazed at her with wet, exhausted eyes; he hadn’t slept: of course he hadn’t slept.

‘You’re insane,’ Eleanor said. ‘You’ll have to see a doctor.’

Eleanor didn’t even drink the tea he brought. She said she’d rather have coffee, knowing there was none in the house. It was a long time since she’d bothered to go shopping. The more Bernard suffered the more she wished to hurt him. She supposed that was human nature. She decided not to think about it too much.

Eleanor took a short-cut through the polytechnic grounds to get to her office and the bracing nearness of Julian. It had been snowing in the night, but now the morning was clear and crisp. The early sun dazzled. The students had remade their snowman. She left the swept path the better to inspect it, treading as delicately as she could through the snow in her little new laced boots with their thin soles and impracticably high heels—Julian had opened accounts for her at all the city’s better stores, and occasionally Eleanor would use them, but only occasionally, and always in Julian’s interests: he loved to see her in the boots and nothing else. The snowman was wearing a scarf of the kind Bernard wore, and the kind Julian would never wear—a fuzzy blue scarf in prickly wool with patches of pale grey struggling through the weave. Julian wore silk scarves, soft against the face. Black stones stood for Bernard’s eyes, and little grey pebbles for tears trailed down his cheeks. And a stick just casually pierced where his heart would be.

The sun was beginning to warm the snow: a thaw had begun. The whole shape of the snowman was becoming indecisive even as she watched: its edges were sloppy and imprecise. She stepped forward and pulled the stick out of the heart, and a whole side of the snowman collapsed, and now only an untidy half of Bernard remained. Then the head toppled forward and fell. She was conscious that her boots were wet: her toes were becoming cold and uncomfortable. Her boots were not intended for such adverse weather conditions. All around the thaw was noisy in her ears. Snow fell and slopped in lumps from branches overhead. Bernard melted, formless, and was gone.

Eleanor called Brenda as soon as she got in to her office and had taken off her boots. She had put the electric fire on and stretched out her toes towards it, to warm them.

‘Brenda,’ she said, ‘you may be right about my being out of my mind. I do have very peculiar feelings of disassociation from time to time. I seem to be on some kind of automatic pilot which is none of my setting. Every moral weakness I ever had is somehow getting magnified to absurd proportions.’