Darcy's Utopia (29 page)

Eleanor, pursued by the press, went first to stay with Jed and poor Prune, but Prune, who seemed to have regained her will and spirits, and was considering adoption, asked her to leave within the week. ‘It’s not just the media forever at the door,’ she said, ‘or you and Jed droning on about free money economics at the dinner table, or the way you sneer at my stews, it’s never knowing what you and Jed are up to. If Jed kept himself to himself more I’d get pregnant. He just wastes his energies.’

‘That’s hardly scientific,’ said Eleanor.

‘I don’t care what it is,’ said Prune. ‘You just leave me and Jed alone. Go and live with your husband.’

‘I can’t. He’s in prison,’ said Eleanor.

‘Where you put him,’ said Prune, ‘with your mad ideas. I mean your real husband, your proper husband, the one and only. You married poor Bernard to get away from home, but that’s your bed; you chose it, you lie in it.’

It seemed not a bad idea to Eleanor, who felt an unusual need for friends and family, but Gillian said she’d rather Eleanor didn’t come to stay, one way and another. Why didn’t she just go on swanning around up at Bridport Lodge? But Eleanor said she couldn’t: Georgina had returned with a battery of lawyers: the university was being merged into the polytechnic: the place hardly existed any more. It had no future role as the arbiter of national economic policy.

‘Oh dear,’ said Gillian, ‘you’ve come such a long way and ended up with nothing! At least Bernard and I have each other. He’s got quite a little business going selling fancy cars.’

‘He doesn’t know one end of an engine from another,’ said Eleanor.

‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Gillian. ‘He was born honest and people know it. That’s all that counts.’

But Gillian did let her round to see Ken. Last time she’d seen him he’d been wrapped in blankets because the gas bill had not been paid and the central heating had been cut off. But he’d been quick off the mark on Loony Sunday, as the media now referred to it, and all the bills were paid. The house glowed with heat and light. It had even been dusted. He was uninterested in Eleanor’s predicament, or the events which had led up to it. A jazz band, circa 1925, was in performance on the television. He did not turn the volume down.

‘I lost Gillian to your Bernard,’ he said, loudly and cheerfully.

‘Can’t say I mind much. She goes on looking after me. Tell you what, I tottered round to No. 93 the other day. It’s been sold at last. Loony Sunday saw to that. Saw your mother there, bold as brass, bright as day.’

‘Rhoda?’

‘No, not Rhoda, Wendy. Your mother.’

‘Did she speak?’

‘How could she? She was dead. She just stood there in a kind of pillar of light.’

‘Was she angry with you?’

‘Not particularly. Why should she be?’

Eleanor switched off the television.

‘Because you made her pregnant, failed to marry her, neglected her, drove her to drink and then married her mother.’

Ken considered. ‘It’s one way of looking at it,’ he said, ‘but not the way I do. Personally, I blame Rhoda.’

He turned the television on again, but Eleanor thought he looked a little shaken. She was glad.

Belinda was cool on the telephone and said, ‘Frank really had a hard time over that stupid money business. It was beneath his dignity to go round picking up money from the street and now everyone’s paid off their mortgage but him. Whatever was Julian thinking? It’s distorted everything and Frank’s furious. You struggle and struggle and suddenly what’s it all about? I don’t think it’s really sensible for you to come to stay, Ellen.’

Brenda said Eleanor was more than welcome to stay as long as she wanted, but perhaps she should wait until the media attention had cooled down a little, and the trial was over: she wasn’t too keen on having the children exposed to the full glare of publicity; she wanted them to live simple lives. Eleanor said she thought it was very likely they would, and took up Liese’s offer of her holiday home; a pretty, simple house in the Forest of Dean. Here she sat out Julian’s trial. Julian was acquitted of tax evasion but found guilty of misuse of public funds—the hospitality offered at Graduation Week events seen in retrospect as grossly extravagant—and was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Eleanor, in the healing tranquillity of nature, for the space of a year, kept her silence before returning to civilization and ordinary society, and most generously offering the story of her life to you, the readers of
Aura
.

Of her spiritual journey during that year she remains silent: it must be left to someone other than myself, Valerie Jones, to record and communicate. It is my part to write the gospel only of the early years.

I
WENT DOWN TO
reception myself to ask them to fax through the last pages of manuscript to
Aura
. The manager asked to have a few words with me: there had been some trouble with Hugo’s Amex card: he was sorry to have to trouble me, but could I register my card with him? I said naturally I would, but the truth was I only had Visa and that, I knew, was way above limit. I looked around for Lou, who, although he growls at such times, usually gives good advice, and then thought, but I’ve left Lou. I’ve left home. I’m with Hugo. And I found myself thinking, Hugo? Who’s Hugo?, which was very strange.

I could hear the fax machine going in the office behind reception and with every page it was as if some blight were being scraped away, some languorous, over-sweet, sickly fungus. It hurt as it lifted: as sudden bright light hurts those long incarcerated in the dark. Of course it did. Bits of tender, soggy skin were tearing off with the mould.

‘Could I just sit down?’ I said to the manager, and he helped me to an armchair with a rather firm squeeze, which might have been a policeman’s touch, or that of a man who knows the woman he touches has been holed up in a room with a man for weeks. How could I tell? Had it been weeks, days? I would have to look at the hotel account to find out. I could see myself in the mirror: bleary, hair uncombed. What was I wearing? One of Hugo’s shirts? Quite a nice pink striped one, I was glad to see: and track suit bottoms in mauve velvet. Not me at all. My children! I was a Woman with children. Where were they? Who was looking after them?

I was beginning to feel quite distressed by my own confusion: but then the revolving doors, which had never ceased their activity as I sat there, perpetually throwing in and drawing out the well-heeled and the faceless, produced quite suddenly three people with faces: Lou, Sophie, Ben, preceded by another, whom I presently recognized as Kirsty Bull, if only by the size of her legs: she had the kind of flat pudding face which could belong to anyone. She came straight up to me.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I made them come. They didn’t want to. They’re all furious. You’ve been a right bitch. They’re helpless without you. Your husband’s insane. Everything’s done to the metronome, from the washing-up to sex. I can’t leave them on their own. They’re not fit. So here they are. You organize them.’

And she swept out of the revolving door.

‘What a terrible woman,’ said Lou. ‘Female double-bass players are always like that. I should never have asked her in, but what was I to do? I had a concert and Ben had an exam.’

I had forgotten about Ben’s exam.

‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘I got my grade eight,’ he said, ‘no thanks to you.’

‘Don’t you talk to me like that ever again,’ I said, thinking fast, and to Sophie before she could open her mouth, ‘Or you either. If you’ve learned your lesson then I’ll come home. Pay the bill, Lou.’

And the children looked quite nervous and subdued and Lou just went to the desk and took out his credit card and paid what was owing, without even studying the details of the account, and I felt not guilty but self-righteous. It was a very strange feeling, as if it came from outside me. The words ‘a sure touch’ came into my head: it seemed a bequest from Eleanor: a compensation for injury more like it. ‘She has a sure touch with men.’ What a gift! Especially since what to other women might be injury—to fall in love against your will and almost without reason—to me had been both an enlightenment and a joy, inasmuch as it was not an ongoing state of affairs, but had, just like that, and with the finishing of
Lover at the Gate
, come to a full stop.

While Lou was still at the desk Hugo came into the hotel and walked straight past me to the lifts. I called him. He turned to look at me and for quite a while he didn’t recognize me. Then he said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Valerie. You look so different!’ I said, ‘So do you.’ He said, ‘Are you going home now?’ It was like the embarrassment after a one-night stand, when neither knows quite how to behave. Yet we’d shared so much. He seemed as puzzled as I had been a little earlier.

‘I finished
Lover at the Gate
,’ I said, to put him at his ease. ‘And Lou has paid the bill.’

‘Lou?’

‘My husband.’

‘That’s good of him,’ said Hugo. ‘Some mix-up with my Amex card.’

I introduced him to Lou.

‘We’ve been working together,’ said Hugo. ‘On a most extraordinary story.’

‘So I gather,’ said Lou bleakly.

Hugo said, ‘It’s going to change the face of the world,’ and I said, ‘It may take more than Eleanor Darcy to do that,’ and Hugo handed me a tape and said, ‘Listen to that. I had it copied. You can keep it. We’ll be in touch, naturally.’

‘If you don’t come home at once, Valerie, I may not have you,’ said Lou and I said, ‘I’ll come home when I’m good and ready,’ which shook him and shook me, and Sophie and Ben watched open-mouthed as their parents spatted. I asked Hugo to give them a pound coin each so they could go and play the fruit machines. Lou said, ‘I don’t allow the children money just to gamble away,’ and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t ask you, Lou.’ And he meditated this, while Hugo found the coins.

Hugo was a tall man with rather stooped shoulders and a lean, intelligent look. I thought I’d probably quite like him if I met him at a party, or was sat next to him at a Media Awards Dinner, but no more. I wondered what he thought of me, now that we could see each other clearly, now that whatever wrinkle it was, whatever upset in the general run-along pattern of events had brushed us up against each other, and held us in place until we could be let go. The marvel was that others had waited for us—for me, at any rate. I was not sure what Stef would do.

‘Lou,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t it be really nice if Hugo and his wife came round to supper one day?’

Lou said doubtfully, ‘It might.’

Hugo said, ‘Well, actually, I think I’m going to change my way of life. I don’t think you’ll see me on the dinner-party circuit any more.’

Lou said he’d never noticed him there in the first place, but that was just Lou. Some things don’t change and I wouldn’t want them to.

And I went back to Room 301 to change and presently walked out of the hotel dressed in the same clothes I had come in—the boring little black dress and the sand-coloured wrap. I couldn’t think why I’d bought either in the first place.

That night I listened to the tape Hugo gave me as his last gift, the brief record of his final interview with Eleanor Darcy.

A
: RULES? YOU WANT
rules? You really can’t survive without a book of rules? Hasn’t the human race progressed at all? Can’t you decide, one by one, what’s right, what’s wrong? Do you have to continue
to believe in groups
? Do you have to believe in the God of your neighbours? Can’t you create one of your own? Surely you know enough by now about yourselves, your compulsions, your motivations, your sibling rivalries, your anal retentiveness, your territorial aggressions and so forth? Have your prophets and wise men, your therapists and social philosophers, taught you nothing? Is it so confusing that you just can’t begin to solve it at all; can’t work hard to build heaven on earth, but prefer to trust in the one after death? I don’t believe it. You underrate yourselves. So you’ll get no rules from me. I tell you this much, there is no excuse any more, you can’t claim ignorance: if you get Darcy’s Utopia wrong there’s going to be no forgiveness: it’ll be too late.

Then Hugo’s voice, a commentary:

Eleanor Darcy was trembling. The morning was chill. She had refused to put on a coat. I took her arm but she shook me off. The grass was bright with dew. The sun had reached the edge of the railway embankment. It dazzled.

Q: Can you be more explicit?

A: This is off the record?

Q: Of course. Who exactly is giving this forgiveness? God?

A: Good lord no, man, in whom I incorporate the lesser, woman.

God has no concept of fairness. Man must place himself above God. God is not the father: God is the child.

Q: Don’t you think that’s rather, well,
enigmatic
of you?

A: Be quiet. These things are difficult to get hold of. And I’m in a hurry. Sometimes I get things wrong. How can I not? I’m human. Man exists not to worship, not to glorify, but to comprehend God so that by that comprehension God can grow. How about that? That seems the gist of it. Sometimes there are not even words for the thoughts. Other languages might be easier.

Q: I’m not hot at theology.

A: Pity. Julian was starting up a new faculty of divinity when he got struck off. They said he would have been better advised cutting courses, not adding to them. Theology, they said, wasn’t sexy as a subject. Little did they know!

Hugo’s voice:

I asked if we should turn back, on the pretext that we were cold. The front room, the sofa with red roses, seemed preferable to the dazzle we approached. I was surprised that Brenda’s children seemed so ordinary, snotty, peevish. Fed by this source of light, they should be little gods. She did not hear me; she was clearly listening to something other than me; I was glad: my nerve returned.

Q: No rules about diet, or marriage, or sex? These are the messages which usually get through.

A: Well of course, but they’re so obvious we all know them. No beef, no sheep, no pig to be eaten: they are all ecologically unsound. Dairy products in moderation. Chicken, fish, so long as the animals breed and live naturally. Empathy must be found with the animal kingdom. If you must have more protein eat each other.