LOVER AT THE GATE [9]
Eleanor brought habits of economy with her from her life as Ellen Parkin: she brought them into Georgina Darcy’s bed, changing the sheets from user-unfriendly linen to easy-care Terylene: she brought them to Georgina Darcy’s table, eating with Habitat cutlery not Darcy family silver, on the grounds that the latter wasted staff time in the cleaning. Julian would be offered Cheddar not Stilton at the end of dinner. Stale bread was used up, not thrown to the ducks on the moat that half ringed Bridport Lodge. The face that stared out from Georgina’s bathroom mirror, marble-set, made do with a smear of Oil of Ulay, not, as had Georgina’s, layer after layer of creams and unguents, one for the eye zone, one for the lip line, others for cheeks and chin. Eleanor was not too proud to use up what Georgina left, in this respect as in all others, but once the pots were empty chucked them out and did not replace them.
And Julian Darcy didn’t mind one bit. Eleanor’s presence in the bed outweighed the cheapness of the sheets, her company at the table was more reassuring than his family’s silver: the Cheddar, she assured him, was healthier than Stilton (by which he knew she meant cheaper) and he said he did not care about the state of her complexion, he had more important things to think about.
Eleanor told four of the six staff at the lodge that they were redundant to her needs, and so they were. These were Mrs Kneely, Mrs Foster, Edward the under gardener and Joan Baxter who came in to do the laundry. These four members of staff were the ones most visibly distressed and startled by Eleanor’s sudden appearance in their midst; the ones who tittle-tattled in the town: who admitted to signing a letter of condolence and support, drawn up by Joan Baxter and posted off to Georgina before Eleanor could intercept it; who somehow or other never managed to make the marital bed, either because of the new sheets or the behaviour of those who now slept in it. It was a better bed, however.
‘It seems that only married Vice Chancellors get their beds made properly,’ observed Julian. ‘When they live in sin they don’t.’ It was Eleanor’s custom to make a bed by straightening a sheet and flinging a duvet. Julian was accustomed to blankets, in the old-fashioned style, tucked and tidied. But who, as Eleanor enquired, could make love properly under tucked blankets? It was absurd.
Julian received letters from his children: Julia, twenty-five, and Piers, aged twenty-two. Both said they would never see their father again, he had treated their mother so disgracefully, and would never accept a penny from him.
Julian said, ‘My children have treated me disgracefully; they have brought humiliation upon me. Julia dropped out of a promising academic career to be a nurse. Piers never gets up before two in the afternoon. Why do they think I want to see them again? I don’t.’
Brenda brought news that the black magic group had been disbanded, and Nerina was to be married in a Muslim ceremony to her brother’s best friend, and no longer went to college. Brenda’s husband Pete had, at Brenda’s insistence, made representation to the academic authorities about the sacrificing of a goat on college property. The RSPCA had been called in. There had been a terrible scandal. The media communications course had been re-evaluated. Hadn’t Eleanor read about it?
‘I’m kind of cut off here at the university,’ said Eleanor. ‘I can never work out which is the real world and which isn’t. But I’m very happy with Julian. That’s all I need to know.’
‘Don’t you even think about Bernard?’
‘I can’t say I do,’ said Eleanor. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’
Brenda said she felt rather the same about her baby. She’d left baby and pushchair behind in the supermarket queue and gone home without them, quite forgetting, but she’d had the baby under a year and Eleanor had been married for fifteen years.
‘That was Ellen,’ said Eleanor. ‘I have been re-born. Risen guilt free as Eleanor from the ashes of the past. Do you think Nerina is continuing her black magic from home?’
Brenda said, from the sound of it, it was perfectly possible. Bernard was still in a bad way: clinically depressed, many reckoned.
‘Won’t Nerina get into trouble for not being a virgin?’ asked Eleanor.
Brenda said she thought there were spells to see to that kind of thing; failing that, cosmetic surgery could put it right. There were local doctors who specialized in it. What did Eleanor do all day?
‘I keep very busy,’ said Eleanor. ‘Julian is giving me a crash course in monetary theory: we mean to write a book together. And there is a local trouble here we have to sort out.’
Eleanor wrote to the emoluments committee declaring that she had reduced the running costs of Bridport Lodge by forty-two per cent, producing figures to prove it, and when it came to difficult and embarrassing votes at Convocation, Senate and Academic Board level, as to whether or not Professor Darcy could be seen to be in his right mind, it was this document that swung the feeling of the various meetings in his favour. Men fall in love: it was their right to do so. To be open about these matters was clearly in the mood of new university thinking, thrusting and energetic, and the various governing bodies did what they could to adjust themselves gracefully. Even when Eleanor enrolled as an undergraduate to do a degree course in economics they did not flinch. And so eventually Professor Darcy’s stock rose, not fell, at the University of Bridport, thanks to his wife leaving him and him taking in, to share his bed and board, and publicity, a young woman half his age, already married to another.
As for Georgina, she went to live with her daughter, and said she wouldn’t take a penny from Julian. Nor did she try to sue him for possession of the matrimonial home – although, as Eleanor pointed out, the house went with Julian’s job, so she wouldn’t have stood much of a chance anyway. She showed little interest in reclaiming her clothes, jewellery, or personal effects. Georgina made it generally known that anyway she’d had it up to here with university life in general and Julian in particular: no one was to make a fuss. The first response antagonized the academic community, who felt as a result more kindly disposed towards Eleanor than they otherwise would: the second eased Julian of guilt.
One morning, as Eleanor and Julian sat at the polished mahogany breakfast table, sipping coffee, and spreading toast made with white sliced bread and Marks & Spencer marmalade, and looking out over the Dorset hills, to the glimpse of sea beyond, Eleanor wearing an Edwardian silk wrap from Oxfam and Julian in a dressing gown inherited from his father – both his parents, perhaps fortunately, for they were the most respectable folk and divorce unknown in the family, were deceased – Julian said, ‘Eleanor, what preparations have you made for the graduation ceremonies?’ and Eleanor said, ‘Why, are they very special?’ And Julian said, ‘Well, actually yes, they are the high spot in the annual university calendar. There are graduation dinners – we hold them here – garden parties in the grounds, teas likewise, concert suppers, around two hundred at each, I suppose; honour graduands to be fêted and so on. Georgina spent quite a lot of time and energy doing it.’
‘I think the university office should do it,’ said Eleanor.
‘Well, no,’ said Julian, quite firmly, and she saw for the first time the glint in his eye which unnerved governments and faculty boards. ‘I think it is your job. You could get in outside caterers,’ he added, and from an untidy drawer drew an untidy file, in spite of which untidiness he laid his hand unerringly upon the card he sought: ‘Highlife Caterers – Academic Functions a Speciality.’
Eleanor said, ‘Caterers are a wicked waste of money. I’ll do it myself.’
Word got round college and university that Ellen Parkin was going to do the Graduation Week catering single-handed and many predicted her downfall. There would be poached egg on toast for tea, they said, instead of salmon canapés with caviar; Irish stew for dinner instead of filet mignon: bread and butter pudding for dessert and sweet sherry all round. There was glee at the prospect. Julian Darcy would realize his mistake and Eleanor would be out on her ear and plain Ellen again, and serve her right. A man who got rid of one woman would get rid of another. And would Bernard take her back? No one knew. No one had seen Bernard lately: his name no longer appeared on the college’s staff list. They assumed they’d know if he was dead, but no one much cared.
Bernard was in fact quite often seen by Eleanor and Julian. He would stand on the gravel drive in front of Bridport Lodge in the very early morning, unshaven and unkempt, staring up at their bedroom window. When he knew he had been seen he would slink away.
‘If only we had dogs,’ said Julian, ‘we could set them on him. Would you like a dog, Eleanor?’
Eleanor said no, she was not a doggie sort of person. Julian said he was glad: Georgina Darcy had been. Georgina was spoken of, when at all, in the past tense. Bernard, in some respect still unfinished business, was at least accorded an existence in the present.
Liese and Leonard came to dine with Julian and Eleanor. Liese had abandoned her principles and now wore a fur coat, and Leonard made up in funny stories anything he lacked in a capacity for abstract thought.
Eleanor went out to the pantry to bring in the trifle the maid had left before going off duty. Liese followed her.
‘Eleanor,’ said Liese, ‘don’t you care any more what’s going on in Mafeking Street?’
‘No,’ said Eleanor.
‘Bernard’s had to move out of No. 93. The mortgage company have repossessed it. And he’s moved in with your father Ken and his girlfriend Gillian.’
‘Gillian? Ken was living with Gillian’s mother.’
‘She’s moved out.’
‘No wonder I have amnesia,’ said Eleanor, and dropped the glass bowl of trifle. It broke. She and Liese scooped what was eatable into a plastic bowl, rearranged it, and served it. Eleanor was the only one who cut her mouth on a sliver of glass. The sight and taste of her own blood falling on to whipped cream recalled the memory of snow, and the snowman which represented Bernard. The next morning she called him, at Ken’s. The bill, she was glad to note, had been paid.
‘Bernard,’ she said, ‘is No. 93 up for sale?’
‘It has been for three months,’ he said. ‘Now the mortgage company own it. It wouldn’t sell because it was haunted.’
‘Only a tiny bit haunted,’ said Ellen. ‘Only by my mother.’
‘It got worse after you left,’ he said. ‘The estate agents said when people came to look over it they’d see things on the stairs, and smell dry rot, though the surveyors couldn’t find any. How are you? Why do you keep sending these divorce petitions through the post? You know I’m a Catholic.’
Eleanor said she’d better come over and see him, and her father, and her father’s new girlfriend.
‘She’s not new,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s been going on for years. She’s much too good for him.’
Ken’s fingers had become arthritic and he could no longer play the banjo. Gillian had a back problem and a cataract in one eye, surprising in one so young, but Bernard said the depletion of the ozone layer and the consequent increase in ultraviolet light was causing an epidemic of cataracts. It was not a cheerful household.
Bernard said along with everything else the curse of invisibility had been put on him. He existed but did not exist. People looked through him in the street, in shops. He might as well be a little old lady for all the notice anyone took of him.
‘Bernard,’ said Eleanor, ‘you are very visible to me and Julian when you stand outside our window. I wish you wouldn’t. It does no one any good.’
‘It does me some good,’ said Bernard, and smiled. He had shaved. He was looking a little less pale and thin. Gillian was a good cook, he said, considering her one eye. She was better than Eleanor had ever been.
‘I never set out to be a good cook,’ said Eleanor.
Ken said, ‘The trouble with you, Apricot, is that you take after your mother. Unstable.’
Eleanor said to Ken, ‘The trouble with me is that I like men twice my age, the same way you like girls half your age.’
Gillian said, ‘It’s tea time!’, and sat them all down to scones, cream and jam, and chocolate cake served on rather dirty plates and tea from a grimy teapot. It seemed her one eye enabled her to cook, though not to pick up Ken’s scattered tissues from the floor, or tidy away Bernard’s many combs. But perhaps she didn’t see it as her business so to do. The combs were all matted: Bernard seemed to be losing his hair. Gillian was a stolid girl, with a pasty face and thick lips. She had pale blue, rather prominent eyes, one very cloudy.
‘You’re going bald,’ said Eleanor to Bernard.
‘It’s that curse,’ said Gillian. ‘That black magic group they set up at the college. They’ve really got it in for poor Bernard. They mean him to lose everything. You were only part of it. It’s not official now but it still goes on.’
Ken said all women were the same, they were all gullible; if Rhoda hadn’t spent all his savings on a quack faith healer he wouldn’t be in this state now.
Eleanor held her tongue and ate some more chocolate cake.
Bernard said, ‘Ellen doesn’t believe in black magic any more than the Marxist dialectic, any more than she did Catholicism. Ellen won’t let anyone believe in anything, except her. Ellen is the new religion.’
Eleanor said, ‘They weren’t really trying to raise the Devil, according to Jed. They were trying to create an optimum environment for an experiment in mass suggestion.’
Bernard said, ‘Jed was trying to create an optimum environment to seduce girl students. Yet he flourishes like the bay green tree.’
Eleanor said, ‘His baby died,’ and Bernard said, ‘That’s flourishing,’ and Gillian said she’d make him wash his mouth out with soapy water and Ken said so far as he could see there wasn’t any soap: there hadn’t been for weeks.
Bernard said, ‘I say what I want. That group of Jed’s ruined me and what’s more it raised the Devil. I saw him. He was floating outside my window, on the second floor. It is not something I care to remember.’
Gillian said, ‘Have some more chocolate cake. I’m sorry I was nasty. It was only a dream, Bernard. He’s been in a bad way, Ellen.’
Bernard said, ‘Dreams are something you wake up from. This was not a dream. It was real. I didn’t wake up from it. He was real. The Devil is real. He has a mouth with flabby black lips and slit eyes like a goat: they glow like a dog’s eyes do in the dark but it wasn’t dark, it was still light. His breath smelt sickly sweet, like dry rot. His skin was scaly and hairy. His edges were a bit blurred but he was real. He was floating, not standing: the ground was too far beneath him for him to be standing, unless he was totally out of proportion, which I suppose is possible. Then he faded away. It wasn’t that I woke up but that he faded out. Except of course he’s still there. Just because you can’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t, Bernard,’ said Gillian. ‘You upset yourself. He came home and gibbered for weeks, Ellen, and never went into college again. Now we’re all on benefits.’
‘Just as well,’ said Ken. ‘He was making a fool of himself; he should have resigned before he was fired. They gave him every opportunity, but you know our Bernard.’
They were very cosy together. Eleanor felt excluded.
Eleanor said, ‘So you won’t be standing outside our window any more, Bernard?’
Bernard said, ‘Oh yes I shall. I have nothing else to do. No car to drive, no job to go to, no hair to comb, no friends, no visibility; I reserve the right to stand beneath my wife’s window and fart while she makes a fool of herself having sex with a buggering old fascist.’
After a little while Eleanor said, ‘Ex-wife’s window, if you’d only sign the divorce papers. It might make you feel better.’
‘Wife,’ said Bernard. ‘Catholics do not believe in divorce.’
‘So you’re back in the faith,’ said Eleanor, coolly and politely. ‘After all that! I couldn’t believe it.’
‘Yes,’ said Bernard. ‘It’s safer. I keep my nose to the ground, think what I’m told, obey the rules, and go to Mass on Sundays. I have been punished for the sin of intellectual arrogance; God has demonstrated to me that the ecstasy of pure thought is reserved for heaven, not for earth; it is for angels, not for man. No, virtue lies in obedience; I will never teach again: it is a sin to interfere with the simple belief structures of innocent students –’
‘Let alone their bodies,’ said Ken, who as he grew older seemed to grow simpler. ‘Heh, heh, heh!’
‘And if I stick to all this,’ said Bernard, ignoring him, ‘my belief is that at least I won’t see the Devil in the flesh again, and that’s just about the height of my ambition. I’ve learned my lesson.’
‘Superstition,’ said Eleanor, ‘will get you nowhere. Shall we change the subject? How’s poor Prune?’
Gillian said, ‘Who’s Prune?’
Eleanor said, ‘Poor Prune is Jed’s wife. We all used to be quite close: not any longer. Jed had an affair with Nerina, but Nerina never liked anyone mentioning it. Now more than ever, I expect, since she’s married.’
Bernard clutched his stomach and said he had a bad pain, as if a needle was being driven into it. Ken said he wasn’t taking Bernard-up to the hospital yet again, Bernard needn’t think he was. Gillian wept – equally out of both eyes, Eleanor was interested to see.
Eleanor said, ‘Well, I must be off. Have you ever thought of taking up catering, Gillian? The chocolate cake was wonderful!’ Gillian said tearfully she couldn’t say she had. Eleanor said perhaps now Gillian was part of the family she’d like to help her out in a little something she’d said she’d do up at the university, and Gillian said okay, anything to get away from this dreary lot. What she couldn’t stand was ill health, especially if it was mental.