Reception rang through and said there was a lady waiting to see me in the foyer. I was in the bath. In the better hotels there is always a telephone by the bath – the sense of importance of those who soak in the provided scented foam being thereby increased. ‘Look, I am the sort of person who is always in demand – always! Why, I can’t even take a bath without being pestered for my time and attention. I’ll come to your hotel again, and tell all my friends.’ And I said, ‘Ask her to come up,’ without thinking too much about it. It might have been my colleague Ann – who knew my whereabouts – or even my editor, come to congratulate me on the first pages of Lover at the Gate which I had faxed through from the hotel’s secretariat – or even Sophie, come to apologize, though I hardly imagined she had been promoted from child to lady in the few weeks of my absence.
And I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in one of the big white towels in which these places specialize, and, with an innocence born no doubt of the habit of the past, opened the door.
A small indeterminate woman in a lightly belted black raincoat slipped in past me: she had wispy fair hair and I could see at once from whence the twins had inherited what I can only describe as their nebulousness – a sense of the nebulae or star cluster that is better seen out of the corner of the eye. If you look too hard it disappears altogether into a kind of wistful, disappointed light in the night sky. Yet she managed to be a rather successful financial journalist. Perhaps all the figures permuting in her head had somehow sapped her reality.
‘Can I help?’ I asked, rather wishing I had more clothes on.
‘I am your lover’s wife,’ she said, and then I was glad I had so little on. I felt like flinging aside the towel. Hugo kept telling me my body was glorious and I had come to believe him. Lou never even looked, on Tuesday and Friday nights, any more than he looked at the instrument he played. He knew it too well. Just as he practised the violin every morning between nine thirty and ten thirty, so I always had the sense he practised his lovemaking on me, getting ready for the real thing, only this with me was not it: I was not it. With Hugo, I was quite definitely the performance: Stef, the more I looked at her, obviously a mere rehearsal. I was surprised when she said:
‘Eleanor Darcy I could understand. But you! What goes on here?’
‘I didn’t ask you here and I don’t want to see you and I have nothing to say to you,’ I said, showing her the door but, alas, she seemed to have no intention of going through it, so I capitulated rather too easily and offered her a drink from the mini bar. She said she’d have a sherry, a nebulous drink itself, so I poured her as dark and sweet a one as I could find in the little tight tiny rows of sinister bottles, and while she drank it I put on trousers and sweater.
‘Hugo likes really thin women,’ she said, ‘when he likes women at all. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that he’s a closet gay.’ I said I didn’t think her opinion was worth very much: if that was the opinion she had of her husband then naturally he preferred someone who admired, loved, trusted and desired him, and why didn’t she just go away?
‘I’ve been to see your husband,’ she said – I didn’t like that at all – ‘and he asked me to tell you that if you don’t return home by the end of the week he is going to join forces with Kirsty Bull: she’s coming to live in and look after your children.’
Kirsty Bull is a friend of mine whose husband left her six months back. I know Lou admires her. She plays double bass, and I reckon Lou is quite stirred by the sight of the hefty instrument so sturdily placed between, let’s face it, equally hefty legs. She tends to wear full denim skirts with lace borders and her hair falls over her face while she plays. Not a style I wish to emulate; I prefer a kind of brisk straight-lined tidiness; but of all the women in the world Kirsty Bull is the one I would prefer not to move in to babysit. It is one thing to move out – not to be able to move back in because one’s place has been usurped is quite another. I didn’t like that one bit.
‘And Hugo will come back to me because he always does,’ she said, ‘when the guilt gets too much. So I’ve just come out of the goodness of my heart to warn you to save yourself while you can: you’ll lose Hugo – where is he, by the way? Not here? No. I can tell you where he is. Chatting up Eleanor Darcy in a flash restaurant. She’s next. Not only will you lose Hugo you will lose your home, husband and children as well.’
She was trying to frighten me off, of course. I didn’t believe a word she was saying. The phone went. It was Hugo.
‘Your wife’s here,’ I said.
‘The bitch,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe a word she says. She said the twins were outside in their buggy and she was lying. By the time I got back inside Eleanor Darcy was gone.’
So I didn’t believe a word Stef said. She went, and I got on with the life of Ellen Parkin, about to emerge from her chrysalis, to spread her wings as Eleanor Darcy.