by Fay Weldon
Nerina stopped being a cosy black bundle and turned into a thin black wraith, by virtue, Eleanor thought, of standing straight, still and offended. Her metal nose mask caught the light from a dancing-girl lamp.
Mrs Khalid said, rather sharply, ‘I don’t think much of your idea of damage containment, Ellen.’
Nerina relaxed and said, ‘That’s okay, Mum. I don’t think it was anything too bad. I’ll go and lie down a bit. They aren’t half kicking about inside.’ And she smiled at Eleanor. Mrs Khalid relaxed too.
Mrs Khalid said as Eleanor went, ‘Lovely to see you again, dear. Such a pity Nerina didn’t stay on at college. But you know what love is.’
‘I do,’ said Eleanor.
Mrs Khalid’s nails were worn to the quick. When she’d been working they’d been long and polished. Eleanor had admired them.
‘I hope everything goes well for you,’ said Mrs Khalid at the front door. ‘I really do. As for me, I just try and keep Nerina happy.’
She shut the door, and it seemed to Eleanor that everything was safe and cosy inside, and noisy and dangerous outside. On the wide pavement in front of her, people of all shapes and sizes and ages crossed and criss-crossed, frenetic in their activity, like ants; yet dull in expression, apathetic of mien. No one was beautiful. Most were in some way distorted or deformed. It was not a good area. A vent at her feet gusted steam from the processes of frying fish in what smelt like everlasting oil, and whirled discarded wrapping paper about her ankles. What was everyone doing? They seemed to understand their own purposes but perhaps they didn’t, any more than she did. A mini-whirlwind lifted a polystyrene dish—large chips, large fish—and it hit her midriff. It didn’t hurt but she was quite afraid.
Valerie laughs thrice
HAD MY RELATIONSHIP WITH Hugo been like any other in the world, and not so very special, I might have thought he was what the columns of Aura refer to as ‘cooling off’. He arrived at the hotel room which was our home apparently exhausted and just a little offhand. Instead of instant lovemaking he sat in the armchair and asked me to ring room service for coffee. There are no coffee-making facilities in the Holiday Inn; if you want any you have to ask them to bring it up, and however hard the staff try to look disinterested, professional and enigmatic, I have no doubt but they return to the kitchens and have the most animated conversations about myself and Hugo. Especially since Stef, on leaving, apparently shouted at the unfortunate girls in reception, ‘There are a pair of adulterers living it up in Room 301, and like as not paying only the single rate. I suggest you look into it!’ Or so the bellboy, trying to be helpful, told me. He is a pleasant lad, Jack, who brings up and takes down the many faxes that travelled between myself and Aura, Hugo and the Independent.
Hugo then took out a packet of cigarettes and smoked one. The entire third floor was designated as a non-smoking area. They ask at reception when you book in. ‘You haven’t started smoking again!’ I said in surprise.
‘The first one for six years,’ he said. ‘The strain of all this is getting to me.’
Now this disappointed me. Naturally I wanted to be a source of happiness to him, not strain. Sensing my reaction, he put out his free hand and stroked mine. I didn’t remind him about the third floor being a smoke-free zone. Stef, I have no doubt, would have done exactly that. It’s all too easy to fall into a maternal role in any relationship—being either the good mother, or the bad mother—and it doesn’t do. (I write for Aura—I read Aura. I know these things. I have no choice.)
I told Hugo about Belinda’s visit, but not about Brenda’s letter; the burning of which now seemed to me a rather pointless exercise in deceit. Hugo’s actual presence dampened the smouldering mixture of anxiety and jealousy which I was learning to live with. Soon, I supposed, I would be so used to it I would hardly notice my changed state. Valerie-with-Lou and Valerie-with-Hugo would feel the same, though they were not. But just to have him sitting there, long-legged, loose-limbed, the two of us engaged in a common purpose, enfolded in a cloud of intimacy that now seemed as real out of bed as in it, gave me great pleasure.
Then he said, ‘I have something I ought to tell you, though Eleanor Darcy asked me not to.’ I felt myself shiver with apprehension, fear of what he was going to say, but it turned out to be nothing. ‘She even makes me turn the tape off and insists I treat it as off the record. She has revelations. All this stuff about Darcy’s Utopia is dictated to her, she claims, by a kind of shining cloud.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
‘Like God appearing to Moses in a burning bush, or the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed as a shining pillar?’ I asked. ‘If nothing else, Eleanor Darcy has delusions of grandeur.’
But Hugo did not laugh.
‘I was walking to the pub with her,’ he said, ‘and there was definitely a kind of light dancing round her head. I was dazzled.’ And I remembered how I keep writing about the luminosity of her flesh and I felt another kind of shiver, this one starting in the back of the neck and travelling downwards so that Hugo seemed to feel it too: his hand pressed more firmly on mine to quieten it.
‘Well,’ I said, as lightly as I could, ‘we’re all dazzled by Eleanor. But does the light come from God or the Devil? The Church is still arguing about St Joan’s voices and St Teresa’s visions. Whether they’d beatify you or burn you alive you never could be sure. Anyway,’ I added after a little, because he’d wanted my attention not my comments, my agreement not my doubt, and it was obvious on his face, ‘all this Utopia stuff, as you put it, is for you to deal with. I don’t know why she keeps going on about it to me. Me, I’m just human interest, women’s magazine. You’re the big time.’
‘I’ll have none of that professional rivalry from you,’ he said, relaxing. ‘Leave that to Stef. I’m really proud of the way you sent Stef packing. She causes trouble wherever she goes. She’s used to being the one in control. She’s the arch-manipulator of all time. I should never have married her.’
And we talked about other things than Eleanor Darcy and our coffee came up; and the waiter raised his eyebrows at Hugo’s cigarette, which I was glad to see he didn’t stub out but continued to smoke, defiantly. I like a man who is not frightened by waiters. And presently when Hugo and I found ourselves in bed, for once a little later than sooner, he said to me—‘Together we remake the universe, you and I,’ and I knew what he meant. He’d had a vasectomy: I’d had my tubes tied: there was no way we could make children. But infusing our love was that sense of a further, deeper purpose than our pleasure alone, which comes so naturally when we’re young and fertile, and is not noticed till it’s gone. I wondered where it came from. It seemed hardly ours by right: it seemed like something given, but who was there to give it?
Later, I asked him where the shining cloud was located that spoke to Eleanor Darcy and he actually said, why, down the end of Brenda’s garden; the other side of the fence, in a little copse just this side of the railway embankment. And I laughed again but, remembering the uneasy vividness of the afternoon she and I had tried to talk in the garden and the tape had failed to record, felt less like laughing.
‘She calls it Darcy’s Utopia, surely,’ I said, ‘because it was all part and parcel of Julian Darcy’s mad scheme to reshape the economy.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Hugo. ‘A great many of Darcy’s ideas came from Eleanor. He was obviously very much under her thumb. And the ideas are not as mad as you might suppose.’ And Hugo, I knew, though he couldn’t bring himself quite to say so, was beginning to feel Eleanor’s ideas came from the Supreme Being, the Prime Mover: that they were more than notions—they were instructions.
‘You know what she told me?’ said Hugo. ‘She told me we should not see ourselves as God’s children, but as God’s parents. We are not the created, but the creators. What we have to do is be worthy of the love offered us by our creation.’
And I laughed for the third time, and said, ‘Well, I’d have more trouble than the Apostles ever did cleaning u
p Jesus’s act, let alone the Companions with Mohammed, in trying to present Eleanor Darcy to the readers of Aura as saint and/or messenger.
And I kept to myself the notion that God must work in an exceedingly mysterious way, in choosing so flawed and cracked a vessel as myself to record Eleanor Darcy’s life, obliging me to write it while myself trapped in a state of most acute sin—if we were to look at it traditionally, which I had no intention of doing, or through Lou’s beady eyes, or Stef’s manic ones, or the puzzled eyes of the five children Hugo’s and my love for each other affected—so mysterious indeed as to make you think we were much more likely to be talking about the Devil than of God. But I didn’t say that to Hugo. I wanted him there beside me on the king-size Holiday Inn bed and that was that.
LOVER AT THE GATE [12]
A disturbance in the economy
JULIAN WAS TO SPEND Wednesday at 11 Downing Street, in conference with the fiscal advisers to the Treasury. At two in the morning he stirred Eleanor awake.
‘These ceaseless problems with the economy,’ he said, ‘are because we’ve never had the nerve to do things properly. We’ve talked about cheap money,’ he said, ‘but we’ve never made it really cheap. We devalue the pound but only on paper. We use it to make people poor, not rich.’
‘Of course,’ said Eleanor, ‘to make the poor rich is to make the rich poor. That’s why we never do it properly.’
His fingers strayed over her breast. She thought of Sharif the beautiful. She wasn’t surprised Mrs Khalid had encouraged her daughter’s marriage. Now they were all bound together: like Rhoda to Wendy to Ken to herself to Bernard, and round again to one-eyed Gillian, for Ken would lose Gillian to Bernard; it was inevitable. And through Jed, through the joining of flesh, to Nerina, and all others before or since: except some seem to count, and some not to count, as did, or did not, death. Some deaths affect you: others don’t, for no reason that you can see. A close friend dies and not a feeling in you stirs: an acquaintance passes on: you weep and wail. As with death, so with sexual partners. Some count, some don’t. Jed counted and she hadn’t known it. If you knew it, would you do it? Most certainly you would. The connections are there to be made. They are foretold, inevitable. That’s why the pleasure goes with them: what you do is the fulfilment of fate’s will.
‘Think of me,’ said Julian, ‘think of me, not whatever you’re thinking of.’
‘I am thinking of you,’ she said.
‘What did you just say then?’ he asked.
‘To make the poor rich is to make the rich poor,’ she repeated. ‘That’s why we never do it properly.’
‘The creative approach to economics!’ he murmured, not without disparagement, into the dark. ‘But you’re right. Now if we were to make money really cheap—the Treasury just might do it. They have to do something. Shortages are endemic. It’s almost as bad in London now as it ever was in Moscow: if you want petrol you have to buy it out of someone else’s tank.’
‘That’s because the tanker men are on strike.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he said gloomily. ‘They were provoked into striking in order to mask the true situation, to give us time to think our way out of this one. We have no option but to jolt the economy. Electric shock it out of depression!’
‘You could always stand on street corners and give money away,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
‘It might do it,’ he said. ‘It just might do it. The old Keynesian way of work creation without the distorting effects of actually doing the work.’
He rolled over and went to sleep. She did not mind one bit. She dreamt of Sharif, which she seemed to be able to do to order. He beat her for her wickedness, and made her shroud herself in black robes as punishment, and she and Nerina shared a bed and he came to both of them while Mrs Khalid listened in the room next door. She had no choice. The house was small, the walls were thin: no wonder she bit her nails.
When Eleanor woke, luxurious and sated, Julian was pulling on his socks and suspenders. He was bright-eyed and elated.
‘It’s the answer,’ he said. ‘The answer! And thank God it’s one of those days when I could convince anyone of anything!’
And so it seemed it was: the meeting went on for only four hours of an anticipated six. The media, domestic and international, hovered outside the door both at Downing Street and Bridport Lodge. Eleanor was much photographed in mesh tights, but remained loyal, though, she felt, in some way coy. ‘If anyone can find a way,’ she found herself saying, unable to stop it, ‘my husband will. He’s a genius. He’s quite nervy, but that always goes with brilliance. He was hospitalized for depression when he was twenty-one. He had a course of ECG, which cured him. Just like Tom Eagleton: remember? McGovern’s running mate. Wasn’t that unfair, that whole business of being unfit for office because of a nervous breakdown? But it was all part of some smear campaign, wasn’t it?’
The think-tank emerged beaming from its meeting. A statement would be made on Monday. On Sunday morning at ten o’clock, without warning, the cash dispensers of the high street banks up and down the nation began to spew out notes. An hour of fives, an hour of tens, an hour of twenties. Then an hour’s pause. Then the cycle began again: neat packages of new notes slid gracefully, unasked, from under their tactful slots, on and on and on.
At first, as the press later reported—the home press subdued and embarrassed, the international press quite hysterical with glee—the public were nervous and suspicious: they kept their distance: then quickly the police arrived, suspecting a malfunction, to guard this enigmatic money supply from looters. As it so happened it was a wet and windy day: in many parts of the country the wind that so often whistles along the high streets whistled to good effect, and whipped wet notes over shops and into alleys and gardens and under the noses of the drunk, the wretched and the homeless, who on the whole disregarded them, understanding well enough that money was not the solution to their problems; what they needed was not to smell and to find someone to like them enough to be prepared to take them in. Word came from on high and the police went back to their headquarters: and, nervously, those who needed the notes to pay electricity and gas bills and mortgages began to gather them up and took them home to their children to count, and were thus relieved of anxiety, and smiled over the meal, and forgot to blame whoever was usually to blame, and made love to wives or husbands, as well as inclination or vigour would allow, and said to their children, okay, if you don’t want to go to school, don’t go: and to themselves, the job I do is pointless, useless; what is more I hate doing it and stayed in bed, and only those who thought, the job I do is valuable, others need me, depend upon me; I like doing it, went, and the traffic moved freely, because there was half the usual volume, and the petrol tanker men went back to work because, as their leader said that Monday morning, ‘Everything’s upside down; the government’s gone insane; we’d better not add to it.’
On Monday noon the machines stopped exuding money. ‘The fools,’ said Julian Darcy. ‘The fools. If they lose their nerve now, they’ve had it! Compromise, compromise! It will be the end of us!’
The move had been made on the strength of a majority of one, he told Eleanor. He had been eloquent in support of the action; others had supported it in theory but wanted time to think about it. An amendment had been moved but lost, to first educate the public, issue instructions; dole out money to the deserving poor, not undeserving: which, as Julian had pointed out, was no different than an increase in benefits: this faction had been defeated. Julian had argued for surprise, for the shock tactics which would jolt the economy out of depression, and he had won the day.
The fury of the country was very great indeed: though whether because it had happened or because it had stopped happening those who stood in the crowds in the public squares did not seem quite to know. The Prime Minister resigned: the EEC put in a stop-gap government of bureaucrats: martial law was briefly imposed: a new currency introduced, conforming to EEC standard. Although, as a few dissidents obse
rved, the three hundred million pounds’ worth of notes which the corner banks had distributed had scarcely affected inflation rates at all. But it was not a popular thing to say. Public pride had been offended. To believe a nation could do without money! Somebody’s fault: Rasputin’s fault: Rasputin of Bridport, the genius who had nervous breakdowns, moved his young mistress into his wife’s bed, dined on champagne and caviar while firing his staff.
‘They’ll blame me,’ said Julian. ‘I know they will. A prophet is always dishonoured in his own country. I’ll be the fall guy. Why did you say that about my having shock treatment when I was twenty-one?’
‘Because it was true.’
‘You don’t love me, you never have. My troubles began when I first encountered you, when I came to your gate—’
‘The lover at the gate,’ said Eleanor, ‘comes for more than he knows.’
‘I should never have left Georgina,’ said Julian. ‘This is my punishment. In my own house I am not believed.’
‘In your own house you are believed,’ said Eleanor. ‘And it was a good time while it lasted.’
The police came in the early hours and took Julian away, giving him not even time to put on his socks and shoes. They made him wear his slippers. They had trumped up, it seemed, charges of tax evasion, corruption and waste of public funds. Eleanor followed him to the police cars in the drive. There were four of them, all flashing their lights in the dawn.
‘It goes against the grain to apologize,’ Julian said, ‘but I shouldn’t have said the hard things I did. I was upset. I love you very much. I don’t regret a minute of it. Two years’ perfect happiness is more than many a man has in his lifetime. But now the nation is humiliated in the eyes of the world and it seems I must pay the price for it. I wonder how many years I’ll get? Will I be allowed pen and paper?’