There is no getting away from it. A study of life, death and marriage certificates show Apricot as the daughter of a certain Wendy Ellis and Wendy herself the legitimate daughter of Bruno and Rhoda Ellis. Ken Smith is named as Apricot’s father and Rhoda Ellis married a Ken Smith in June 1965, Bruno Ellis having died in March of that year. The ages tally. It puts perhaps a kind face on things: but sometimes families do just get into dreadful muddles, with no one doing anything particularly awful. In 1973 Wendy Ellis, poor Wendy, a spinster, died aged thirty-five of liver failure. Livers fail because of cancer, or hepatitis, or drug overdose, but mostly I suppose because they are assailed by alcohol and just can’t cope. And no woman, I daresay, can settle easily to the knowledge that her child’s father has married her own mother: and drink, while ruining livers, certainly eases pain. But I don’t think the readers of Aura will want me to dwell too much on the pain. I try to be unemotional, without much success. Sex renders one tearful, I find.
A love song on the crackly Holiday Inn radio which the maid always switches on as her final flourish after she’s done the room (Hugo and I go down to the pool and swim and use the sauna while we wait for her to finish) or a pop song on the telly as Hugo and I eat our continental breakfast (orange juice, coffee, a croissant and a Danish each), too languid even to stretch out for the remote control and switch it off – will make tears come to my eyes: move me with the desire to say, You do love me, don’t you! This love will last for ever. This love, lasting forever, makes me immortal. This love replaces death. I don’t say it, of course. I have read too many surveys in Aura – written them indeed – which prove that men feel trapped and uneasy if the word ‘love’ is mentioned, especially in proximity to any other word suggesting permanence. I just roll the phrases round inside my head, smoothing them out, absorbing them back into me, until they’re gone.
When I heard Eleanor Darcy’s eulogy on Hugo’s tape, I was much moved. Her soft determined voice inspired me: any doubts that remained evaporated: guilt and fear were dispelled, embarrassment fled: my body led me, not my mind. Eleanor Darcy spoke and I left home and hearth to follow my lover.
‘Look here,’ Hugo said, ‘surely I had something to do with it?’ and I laughed and said, ‘How could you not? You too heard the tape!’
Lou has never seen love as a sufficient motive for anyone doing anything, which, when it comes to it, I daresay is why I left. I can trust Hugo not to treat me as I have Ken treat Wendy in Lover at the Gate and, if he did, I would never indulge him as Wendy did Ken. Look where it led! Women do have to fight back. Apart from anything else, I can’t help feeling that if women let men get away with too much bad behaviour, men do not forgive them for the burden of guilt they then have to bear. They feel their shoulders breaking beneath the load. They get out from under.
I am a self-contained person: neat and elegant: or was until I met Eleanor, who, disgraced, childless, alone, sprawled and wriggled against the shiny black sofa with the big red flowers, and I knew I would rather be her, her life out of control, than me as I was with Lou; a woman whom an editor could describe as ‘the mistress of controlled reportage’.
‘Valerie,’ the editor of the Mail on Sunday said to me once, after I had filed a neat and convincing piece on an earthquake – the ground had trembled beneath me in Rome, where Lou was playing with the London Symphonic and a wall had fallen on top of me and trapped me for two hours – ‘you are the mistress of controlled reportage. We can’t run the piece, as it happens. The stock market has collapsed. I hope you didn’t get your hair mussed.’
I just smiled and said ‘a little’ – but I was hurt. I thought he was laughing at me. I joined the staff of Aura shortly afterwards. ‘Mussed’ is a word so outmoded I’m surprised the God of Media didn’t strike him down on the instant with a thunderbolt. Pre-Hugo, come to think of it, my hair never got mussed. Now I can scarcely get a comb through it in the morning. To each their own earthquake.