Love struck like a whirlwind. I was not expecting it. I did not want it. I, Valerie Jones, a married woman in a good job, with as contented a home life as could reasonably be expected, went in a very ordinary little black dress to a Media Awards Dinner, and was seated next to Hugo Vansitart. I was about to say ‘quite by chance’ but it was of course our destiny. He arrived late: too late for the prawn pâté – lucky him, I said – but in time for the chicken. There was an instant rapport between us. My husband Lou had not come with me: he hates these affairs: the massing together, as he describes it, of the chattering classes. Or was it because he was in Stuttgart, or Stockholm, or somewhere, playing his violin? I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Nor was Hugo’s wife Stef with him. She was in Washington, interviewing the Pope. Or someone, somewhere. I just remember thinking that’s the wrong person in the wrong place, how odd. Would it have made a difference if Lou had been there, or Stef had been there? I don’t think so.
Of course I knew Hugo Vansitart by his by-line. He is one of our leading political journalists. When I saw his name on the place card I thought, Oh dear, he’ll be bored by me. He’s much too clever for me. I am features editor of a leading women’s magazine – a weekly. Aura. We’re intelligent enough, I hope, but naturally, considering our market, are more concerned with matters of human interest than anything particularly intellectual. I didn’t want Hugo Vansitart to hold my magazine against me: define me by my employers. I had not expected him to be so good-looking. I scarcely liked to look at his face, at first. He just sat down beside me, brooding, dark, vaguely squarish, decidedly male, filling an empty place which had made me feel uneasy. He was late, he said, because he’d done the first of a series of interviews with the Bride of Rasputin out in the suburbs somewhere beside a distant railway line. It had taken him forever to get back to the centre of things. ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘Eleanor Darcy! I’m to see her tomorrow. What a coincidence!’
He laid his hand on mine and said oh, dear, he thought he’d had an exclusive: the editor of the Independent wasn’t going to like this one bit: I said, well, everyone likes to be the only one, in newspapers as in life, but I didn’t think he should worry. We might overlap but we would not coincide. He was no doubt doing his pieces on the Bridport Scandal and the phenomena of Darcian Economics: I had been commissioned by my magazine to do a serialized biography of Eleanor Darcy herself. A kind of docudrama for the lay reader.
‘Did she approach the magazine, or the magazine approach her?’ was the first thing he asked.
‘She approached us.’
He did not ask me how much Aura was paying, though I knew he badly wanted to. I told him later, in bed. She had asked for a hundred thousand pounds: we were paying half that. Though an interest in Darcian Economics persisted, my editor’s opinion, when presented with the demand, was that the public had begun to shift its attention from Eleanor Darcy. Rasputin, Julian Darcy, was famous: the Bride of Rasputin, rightly or wrongly, notorious. Fame is worth twice as much as notoriety. She asked for a hundred thousand pounds, she got fifty thousand pounds. There seemed a kind of journalistic sense in this.
‘How do you find Mrs Darcy?’ I asked. ‘What kind of person is she?’
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘She talks a lot, not always about what one wants to know. Be sure to ask her about the Devil.’
‘Better,’ I said, ‘that she talks too much than too little. Easier to cut than to pad.’
He said he supposed so. He said how remarkable it was that we should be sitting together. Himself about to write the gospel of Julian Darcy according to Hugo Vansitart, myself the gospel of Eleanor Darcy according to Valerie Jones. Great trust had clearly been put in us. His forefinger moved over mine. It was strange. So sudden, so unlikely, and yet so right, so fitting. I sat there in my boring little black dress, rather too thin and flat-chested for fashion, too old for comfort – as thirty-nine is – my hair cut too short that very day, in a wrong-headed attempt at sleekness, and felt my whole being lurch out of one state into another. I was all confident spirit – no longer blemished flesh. Then I heard my name being called. I’d actually won Feature Writer of the Year, Women’s Media Division. I got to my feet, worked out my route to the top table – I had in no way expected this honour – looked back at Hugo, and we exchanged smiles — or rather committed some kind of Act of Complicity, in which he summonsed and I acquiesced. I had never done such a thing before.
‘All treats,’ Hugo said, when I returned with my metal statuette – no cheque, alas – ‘all treats tonight. Would you like to hear my Eleanor Darcy tapes?’
I said I would and we went to a Holiday Inn together, one of the rather grand, central city ones, which are anonymous as well as luxurious, and hideously expensive, but the beds are huge and the bathrooms good. I listened to Eleanor Darcy’s tape and tried to concentrate upon it. ‘She should not be so insulting to women’s magazines,’ I remember saying. Then it was all extraordinary. Why me, I kept thinking, why me, this is so amazing, so out of character, this is not the way I live. One early boyfriend, one husband, now this: myself, surprised by joy.
In the morning he said, ‘What will they say at home?’
I said, ‘I don’t care. What about you?’
He said, ‘Neither do I. Shall we stay here? Live here? Together?’
I said, ‘Why not? It could hardly be more expensive than living at home.’
And we both knew I lied but who cared?
He said, ‘Without home to distract us we could both do our pieces on Eleanor Darcy without others complaining, without children demanding. My tapes will help you, your tapes will help me.’
I said, ‘We’ll distract each other.’
He said, ‘But only in a supportive kind of way. We’ll get the balance right. We’re both workaholics. We’ll fuse.’
They had good office services at the Holiday Inn. They even provided us with word processors, IBM compatible; one each, it being a double room. I went down the road to Marks & Spencer for clothes. Mostly just satin slips and wraps and so on – I didn’t see myself going out much. What for? I called my number. Lou had put the answerphone on. The children would have got themselves to school. They were competent enough. My main function in the home, I remarked to Hugo, was as Witness to the Life. I left a message to say I had left home.
I gave my new telephone number to Aura, and settled down to love Hugo and prepare to write the life and times of Eleanor Darcy. Hugo went home once to fetch a suitcase, and was back within the hour. We did not wish to lose a minute of each other’s bodies, each other’s company, if it could possibly be helped. We had each other, we had our work, we had room service — what more did we need? We were well and truly happy. I had never felt the emotion before: nor, he said, had he.