Darcy's Utopia (3 page)

The trouble is I have committed myself, through my editor, to writing the life of Eleanor Darcy. I can’t take on the extra freelance commissions which will now come my way. On the very afternoon of the Media Awards Dinner I signed a contract with
Aura
undertaking to work exclusively on the project until delivery of the ms. Well, I will just have to work hard and get it done quickly. Fortunately, sex with Hugo takes up less time than, to be blunt, not-enough-sex with Lou. There is no time wasted teacup washing, dinner-party chatting, tense family-outering—the things we all do to pretend to ourselves and the world that there is more to marriage than sex. I can simply get into bed with Hugo and out of it to get on with
Lover at the Gate
, as Eleanor Darcy wishes the work to be called. I should feel guilt, remorse, doubt, distress, despair and so forth: I don’t. I should be in some kind of shock, but I am not. I should be debating the wisdom of my actions; I do not. I do not look into the future beyond the delivery of the manuscript. Why should I? Let the coins fall as they will: in due course it will become apparent whether they were heads or tails.

So if I get one or two things wrong in my account of Eleanor Darcy’s life, I tell myself, it will be her responsibility as much as mine. She chose
Aura
,
Aura
chose me. I repeat—I am what I am, I do what I can. Mrs Darcy does not make matters easier than she can help. I have the feeling she does not like me very much. She threw a few grains of fact at me during the course of the interview, as if she were scattering crumbs for a hopping sparrow. If I were working for the
New Statesman
or the
Economist
I would obviously have more interest in Darcy’s Utopia. I have in fact written pieces for both these publications. Because I am currently working for
Aura
does not mean I’m an idiot. I just need to know why her mother called her Apricot, and time is short, because both interviewer and interviewee get tired, and besides, I wanted to get home to Hugo.

Nor did she make things easy for me. Her voice is soft and low and she kept moving out of recording range. She once even said, ‘If it’s not on the tape, just make it up: it will be more interesting to your readers,’ which I thought rather insulting to me: certainly it made me feel diminished in my profession. Journalists are trained to report accurately what they are told, and to come to honest rather than convenient conclusions. We are, as Eleanor made me realize, alarmingly dependent on the veracity of our informants: we come to expect lies or half-lies in some few areas—age, or income, and those in public life will often fail to reveal their true opinions in their attempt to present an acceptable face to the world—but outside these areas the natural inclination of most folk is to speak the truth if they possibly can. They don’t speak of themselves and the world as if it were some kind of fictional creation which can be rewritten and subedited at will, as if one version of it were as valid as another. They do not normally pull visions of the Devil, as Mrs Darcy did in her interview with Hugo, out of a hat, to divert and deflect: they do not insist on fusing truth with Utopian notions, especially when they have the nerve to charge fifty thousand pounds for the privilege. I daresay Eleanor Darcy thinks money grows out of everyone’s ears. It might, for
Aura
, if she were more inclined to talk about the ordinary things of life, such as what she gives her friends for Christmas or what she reads on holiday.

Another thing: Eleanor Darcy is not a
still
person, a
quiet
person, as I am, or try to be. During our interview she quite frankly wriggled. First one leg over the other, then the other over the one: torso first this way then that, sometimes slouching; only once, when talking about her period as Bride of Rasputin, Vice Chancellor’s wife at Bridport, did she sit in what I would describe as an ordinary, decorous and ladylike fashion. Although the room was not particularly warm, she wore only a white T-shirt—well, whitish: like so many others nowadays no doubt she uses a phosphate-free environment-friendly washing powder- and jeans. Energetic people, those whose minds and bodies are active, seem, if not to notice the cold, at least to rather enjoy being so. To go about without the vest, without the wellies, without the coat, is to some people as smoking is to others, a celebration of freedom, of coming of age, of an escape from parental control. ‘You can’t go out like that,’ says the mother, ‘it’s freezing!’ And the rest of life is spent without a coat.

Eleanor Darcy said she was thirty: I would give her thirty-four or five. She is good-looking enough but not stunningly beautiful: I am always surprised at the plainness of women for whom men develop irrational and obsessive passions, as Julian Darcy clearly had for Eleanor. How else to explain the events leading up to the Bridport Scandal? Napoleon’s Josephine was a little, spotty thing: Nelson’s Lady Hamilton a fat and blowsy piece. Eleanor Darcy is intelligent, of course, and intelligence in a woman does turn some men on, though not many. Hugo, thank God, is one of the few.

Intelligence, I have always thought, makes it difficult for a woman to wear make-up: perhaps it’s as simple a matter as the mobility of a face making the stuff sink in, vanish, fail to remain the smoothing mask it’s meant to be. Eleanor Darcy’s skin was
patchy
: she was using too dark a shade of foundation cream. She had smudged a little grey eye shadow around the eye area and lip-lined her mouth rather crudely, failing to fill in with actual colour as most people do: her brown hair frizzed out round her head in a rather uneven halo. I don’t think it had been permed, merely squidged and scrunched as it dried. By and large she seemed disinclined to pay her appearance much attention, as if there were other far more urgent things to attend to. The mothers of small children often look like this, as we know, but Eleanor didn’t even have this excuse. Her legs were muscular—the jeans were tight: perhaps she had put on weight recently—and she had a strong neck and a firm chin, a shiny nose and bright rather deep-set eyes. People’s appearances, of course, add up to more than the sum of their features. A kind of overall impression is delivered, which is sometimes belied by actual detail and is more, I suppose, to do with confidence than anything else. The fact is that Eleanor Darcy looked and acted as if she were Queen of the World, as if to be the one to bring down a government was all in the day’s work and she was now turning her attention to the future. I tried not to resent it. I tried to like her, not to be awed by her: to match the power of her vigorous mind with the centring energy I felt in me, by virtue of the fact that Hugo loved me. I did not, as it were, go empty handed into that bargaining chamber, and I was grateful for it.

She spoke, as I would have expected, in mid-English: a kind of neutral middle-classedness which blurred her origins: the kind used by lady news presenters on networked TV. But listen carefully, and occasionally the sloppy vowels of the suburbs would seep through to betray her origins: and even the slight nasal whine of the rather more underprivileged. The child’s experience of life comes through in the adult’s use of language—whether the desire to escape the original background altogether, or to camouflage, defiantly to accept, or, by denying, to get out into the world and get on. Eleanor Darcy, I had no doubt of it, had been a brave and ambitious child.

She was at home, yet not at home, in her friend Brenda’s house. Brenda is a former school friend, who has so definite a ‘no comment’ policy as to be of very little help to
Aura
’s readership. She is the mother of four children under seven, and I think in the circumstances remarkably loyal to Eleanor, who lounges around her living room, sprawling, filling up time and space, talking about subjects way above Brenda’s head, though Brenda told me, as I left—as well as she could for trying to get on the children’s boots—that in fact she ran the local branch of the Labour Party and was active in environmental matters. It is always a mistake to suppose people to be
ordinary
, just because they have four children under seven and a low income. Almost no one is ordinary. Dig a little into ‘ordinary’ lives and you find passion, desperation, amazing acts of self-sacrifice and self-control and often powerful religious belief. It is only when the ordinary are suddenly elevated to the ranks of the un-ordinary that both their virtues and their eccentricities become apparent. Brenda, nevertheless, does still seem rather stubbornly ordinary, as does her house, a new semidetached on a slip road in an outer suburb. It has the virtuous shabbiness of the home of a good mother of four, whose husband is a mini-cab driver—that is to say is doing the best he can while getting his act together. Brenda brought us, without complaint or comment, many cups of caffeine-free instant coffee during the course of the interview. I can scarcely even remember what she looks like, except that her skirt was too tight and her stomach bulged, as stomachs do when you have had four children in a short time and are too unselfish to take the time to exercise. Her taste in slip covers for her three-piece suite was not good. Red roses on shiny black fabric is out of place in a humble suburban house, when the carpet is rough, serviceable hessian and toys pile up in the corners of rooms, and not even the most dedicated can find the time or energy to move them: if indeed there is anywhere to move them to. Hugo complained that the sofa was greasy and he got jam on his cuff. I did not think he would give much column space to Brenda. Readers do not pay to read about the likes of themselves.

But I may be wrong. One interview with Eleanor Darcy, some nights with Hugo, and I can already see I may be wrong about many things. My mind may, creaking and protesting, have to go into some new gear, as my body has already done, leading the way. I had always assumed that journalists—all professional people, in fact—should keep their work life and their love life apart, were they young and foolish enough to have the latter. I was wrong. I could see lust quite remarkably sharpening the edge of my writing. I had been married to Lou for fifteen years; our children, Sophie and Ben, were now thirteen and twelve. We had led a peaceful organized and unpassionate family life. If I had never been tempted to mix my professional and my personal life, it was because the opportunity to do so, alas, had not arisen. I had seen myself, as I had Lou, as the kind of person who has just about enough sexual energy when young to get it together with a member of the opposite sex and start a family and then leave all that kind of thing to others. I was wrong. All I had done was lower my sights, in the interests of respectability, moderation and a quiet life, and presented myself to the world as someone altogether ladylike, altogether a-sexual. It had worked so far and no further. I had been seated next to Hugo at dinner. Love had struck like lightning, leapt with the whirlwind; I loved, I worked, I thought, I felt, and there was no separating any of them out, or wanting to. Thus prepared, I will insert a new computer disc and begin
Lover at the Gate
.

‘I
THINK I FEEL A
pain,’ said Wendy Ellis, Eleanor Darcy’s mother. It was the middle of the night, in the summer of a year somewhere between 1959 and 1964. Wendy lay in bed next to her boyfriend Ken. Wendy was twenty-one and wore an apricot-coloured shortie nightie in brushed nylon. Her hair, for all she was eight months and one week pregnant, had that day been coiffeured, lacquered and backcombed until it stuck out all around her head. Wendy lay on her back. No other position was comfortable. Ken lay beside her, stiff and tense, not able to sleep. Her body was warm and relaxed; she had no choice in the matter. The baby dictated things such as maternal temperature and tension. It seemed to have no power to affect the father. Ken had come home late from a gig he had not enjoyed. He played banjo for a living and did a little woodwork on the side: fitting a bathroom here, a kitchen there, anywhere but at home.

‘I think he’s on the way,’ said Wendy.

‘She,’ said Ken.

‘He,’ said Wendy. ‘I know it’s a boy.’

‘We only have girls in our family,’ said Ken. He had five sisters.

Ken was twenty-eight. He had a round pink face, little bright eyes, a small body, a lot of fair hair, quick fingers, a quick mind, and a great deal of energy. He was no beauty, women agreed, but he had charm. A twinkle from the back of the band and they were his. If he wanted, which he told Wendy he didn’t, now he had her. Tonight he was tired and contrary. Anger had tired him. What he described as the class system had rendered him contrary. A private party: mostly Rolls-Royce dealers: five hours’ practically non-stop playing: family favourites only: raised eyebrows if the band took a break; stale ham sandwiches and bright yellow orange squash the only meal provided, part of the deal, and ten pounds for the whole band divided by five. Not enough. The guests drank champagne. The men wore dinner jackets: they brayed; the women evening dress and squealed. The band wore dinner jackets too, the girl singer more jewels than the lady guests, but Ken had sussed that one a long time ago. It was a joke played by the haves against the have-nots. You don’t work for money, the haves conceded, all you want is to be near us in order to become us. So dress like us for an hour or so: come close, come closer: brush up against us if that’s what you want. We’ll dance to your tune the happier, syphon off your magic the better. Then take your money and go. Back to your hovels. Now he was back in his hovel and naked, lying next to a girl who was having a baby and had moved in with him on that account.

‘If you only have girls in your family,’ said Wendy, ‘how come you exist?’ She was quarrelsome. That too the baby seemed to dictate: She thought perhaps the baby was very clever: her friends remarked upon how sharp she’d got since she became pregnant. It stood to reason, Wendy thought, that the mother-baby connection worked both ways. With every child you had, you’d get infected with that baby’s qualities. The ‘friends’ were mostly girls at work: she had to have those independently of Ken. Ken tended to put people off. He slept when he was sleepy, ate when he was hungry, only talked if he had something to say, whether there were guests in the house or not. Wendy liked him the way he was. He made her feel real. She would rather have him than a hundred friends.