Darcy's Utopia (26 page)

‘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.

N
OW HUGO AND I
had been having a small ongoing indifference of opinion. He wanted to read
Lover at the Gate
—I’d said no, not until I’d finished it, polished it, was happy with it. The real reason was rather different—firstly, the piece seemed intensely private: secondly, he might decide I’d got everything wrong. And of course it was a severely fictionalized piece of work—it had to be; Eleanor provided so few clues, and in such a roundabout way. Yet I believed, I
believed
, I had got her right, and I didn’t want Hugo puncturing the balloon of my belief.

At least I knew that Hugo was so honourable that he wasn’t going to read the manuscript against my wishes. He was a better person than I was; he didn’t steam open other people’s mail and then burn it. Valerie-with-Lou would never have done such a thing. Valerie-with-Hugo seemed capable of anything. I wondered why I didn’t worry about our steadily mounting hotel bill. Was I not the kind of person who worried about such things? Lou had put a stop on our joint account—when you look into the finances of a marriage it is astonishing how little a trusting wife can claim as her own, should that marriage disintegrate (another piece for
Aura
? I might even write it myself) but even this did not perturb me. If I thought about it, it seemed unlikely that Hugo could pay it. Stef had used his and her bank account to pay off the mortgage on their house, and there was nothing in it at all. And he had told me his Amex card had been withdrawn after some mix-up with his last payment.

We remained suspended, Hugo and myself, here in the Holiday Inn, bound in servitude to Eleanor Darcy by virtue of the words we fed into our computers. Neither of us wanted to break the spell. Neither of us wanted to be reclaimed by the real world.

The fact was that I was becoming more and more institutionalized in the Holiday Inn. The outside world seemed noisy, and dangerous, and difficult to decipher. Inside everything was safe and cosy. In ‘Hotel Services—A Guide’ was everything necessary to sustain a peaceful and comfortable life, from Church Services (dial 5 for Concierge) to Ironing Board (dial 3 for Housekeeper). I had to get a colleague to go down to St Katherine’s House and check the marriage and divorce records. And yes, I was right, there was no record of a divorce between Ellen and Bernard Parkin, and Eleanor Parkin and Julian Darcy had certainly gone through a marriage ceremony. Also, Bernard Parkin had recently married Gillian Gott in a religious ceremony. Both were bigamists! I was tempted to call one of the gutter newspapers and raise the money to pay the hotel bill, but refrained. A large sum for me, a small agreeable snippet of news for them, could disrupt lives most unpleasantly though I could see that Julian Darcy, in prison, might have found it welcome information. Also, it’s always useful in the media world to have something secret up your sleeve. You never know.

The operator put through a call from Belinda Edgar, who wanted to see me. She was a friend of Apricot’s; she’d heard I was writing a book about her. She thought she might be of help.

‘So long as you come here,’ I found myself saying, ‘and I don’t have to go out, that’s fine by me.’

She said she would. She asked if she’d be able to see what I’d written and, although I was nervous, I said yes she could. She sounded a bright, positive, friendly person, and so she turned out to be. An initial impression given by a voice on the telephone is usually the right one.

She came—pale-skinned, small-eyed, rounded, exuberant—and skimmed through the manuscript. She worked, she said, part-time as a publisher’s reader. She lived a pleasant life: she and her husband had two small children and, unlike Brenda, she had help in the house. It’s a sorry fact that a woman’s fortune so often depends upon the man she marries.

‘Well,’ said Belinda, when she finished reading—I tried to appear indifferent, not to pace up and down—‘you’ve got a lot of it right. I hadn’t realized that Apricot’s marriage to Julian was bigamous. Poor Julian: I went to visit him in prison once, but I don’t think he was pleased to see me. He remembered me as one of the waitresses the year we helped Apricot out when she catered for Graduation Week. He couldn’t think why he was being visited by a waitress. He always was a terrible snob. Liese got asked to dinner because Leonard shoots grouse with the best people, even though it’s only because they want a cheap car, but Frank and me never qualified. Too arty. Even in an open prison he manages to be hopelessly urbane. They all hate him. But he was right about a-monetarism. There’s quite a group of us believe in it, you know. The only way to move society out of its present predicament, the dead end of the surplus society, is to devalue money itself.’

‘You must talk to my friend Hugo Vansitart about that,’ I said. ‘I’d very much appreciate your views on the supernatural. Was there, in your opinion, any sort of curse on Bernard?’

‘You mean other than just being married to Apricot?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Of course not,’ said Belinda. ‘The media communications course set off a kind of mass hysteria, that’s all.’

‘Brenda seems to think there was. Is.’

‘Oh, Brenda!’ said Belinda. ‘She’s got four children under seven. You can’t expect sense from her. It was all simple cause and effect; Apricot left Bernard and he went to pieces. He was already halfway there. The economy went to pieces when the cash dispensers started pouring out money; but on Sundays only, thus spoiling the whole idea. It had already more or less collapsed. Of course there was resistance. No one was properly prepared. People panicked: They saw the differential going between rich and poor: they didn’t understand what was happening. They can understand Communism and they can understand Capitalism, but that’s all. That the West should try and adopt the Soviet non-money economy, just as the Soviets try to take Capitalism on board, blew their minds. People like polarities—Apricot’s always saying that. Had Julian and Apricot simply wanted to switch them, that would have worked; people would have accepted it. But in the end the courage to see it through wasn’t there.’

‘In other words, the Devil got into the works and spoiled everything,’ I said.

‘So long as you’re talking metaphorically,’ said Belinda. ‘So long as you don’t get any idea into your head that there’s some power out there talking through Eleanor Darcy’s mouth, at any rate one which knows what it’s talking about.’

‘Well,’ I said comfortingly, ‘Hugo is dealing with the political and economic background. I’m more concerned with the human angle.’ I had the feeling she didn’t like me very much. But the mistress is always an offence to the married woman. ‘You feel I’ve got her more or less correct?’

‘You’ve got Apricot’s life the way she would have wanted it to be, let’s say that. Well, thank you. I’ve made up my mind. I’ve thought for a long time I might write something about Apricot, now I’m pretty sure I will. You do the gospel according to St Valerie, I’ll do the gospel according to St Belinda.’

And I realized I hadn’t been milking her for information, she had been milking me, and I, like a fool, had let her read my manuscript. And I also thought, serve me right. Since holing up in this Holiday Inn I hadn’t been a nice person at all. I’m sure when I lived at home I was a
better
person all round.

As soon as my hand had stopped trembling I set to work again. There is nothing like work for putting an end to unhealthy introspection.

E
LEANOR WENT TO VISIT
Jed and Prune. She found poor Prune in tears, but that didn’t surprise her. Prune had miscarried another baby, at three months. It was clear to Eleanor that she intended creeping about her kitchen for the rest of her life, trying to bind her errant husband to her by having babies she was not fit to have.

‘Oh, Ellen,’ said Prune, ‘you’re so famous now I hardly know what to say to you.’

‘You never did,’ said Eleanor, brutally. Poor Prune always made her feel brutal. ‘And to be Rasputin’s wife hardly counts as fame.’

‘I don’t know why you don’t just do a nude centrefold and have done with it,’ said Prune. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me about me? Don’t you care? I’m so unhappy. I am a failure. Three miscarriages and a stillbirth.’

She was peeling onions and seemed in no hurry to stop.

‘If you didn’t keep rubbing your eyes, and pressing more and more onion juice into your eyeballs,’ said Eleanor, ‘I expect you would soon feel better. What are you making? Stew?’

‘Steak and onion pie,’ said Prune. ‘Jed loves steak and onion pie.’

‘Love my pie, love me,’ said Eleanor. ‘You’ve got a hope. Why don’t you just give him frozen curry? How is Jed?’

‘Working in his study,’ said Prune. ‘Poor. Jed. He works so hard. He longs for a son and I can’t give him one. And if I gave him frozen curry I’d feel even more useless. One day he’ll leave me and it will all be my fault. Then what will I do?’

‘Begin your life,’ said Eleanor. ‘You’d better begin soon or it’ll all be gone.’

‘You’ve changed,’ said Prune, through onion tears. ‘You’re hard and cynical. I’m glad I’m not like you. Besides,’ she added, ‘what can I do? I never got my degree; I’m not trained for anything; I can’t do anything. I get asthma if I try. All I do is cry all the time, or gasp for breath, so who would ever employ me? What kind of CV have I got?’

‘Spent life trying to have babies,’ said Eleanor, ‘and failing,’ and went on up to see Jed.

‘Are you staying to lunch?’ Prune called after her. She had long straight hair and wore flat wide shoes. ‘Do stay to lunch. I’m sorry if I was rude. I’m upset, that’s all. Jed would love you to stay to lunch. We never see anyone.’

Eleanor went up the red-carpeted suburban stairs and knocked at the door on the left, where a little white plaque with a rim of roses said ‘Study’. Inside, in a leather chair, sat Jed, at ease and happy, smoking a pipe, reading galley proofs. He had a pleasant, lined face and a jaw which protruded, as a goat’s does, and slightly rheumy eyes, though Eleanor remembered them as bright, bright, bright. Books lined the walls; papers lay on the floor: on ledges stood mandalas, icons, pentacles. A book jacket rough lay on the table—‘The Story of the Pentacle: a Study in Self-oppression’.

Incense burned and mixed with the pipe smoke: the room was warm, scented, foggy.

‘I know why you’ve come,’ said Jed. ‘You’ve come looking for the villain of the piece. Well, you’re looking in the wrong place. How healthy you seem. The high life suits you.’

‘It suits everyone,’ said Eleanor.

He rose to his feet. His jacket was brown and tweedy, and had orangy leather patches on its sleeves at the elbow. He smelt of pipe tobacco and wet dogs; a Labrador lay by the hearth. Jed was taller than she was by some four inches. She laid her head on his shoulder; she could not do that with Julian. He wore sandals and no socks. He would never wear red sock suspenders. His feet would look strange in the shiny, elegant, pointed shoes which Julian wore. Jed and Julian were two bookends. Other men took their place in between.