Had my relationship with Hugo been like any other in the world, and not so very special, I might have thought he was what the columns of Aura refer to as ‘cooling off’. He arrived at the hotel room which was our home apparently exhausted and just a little offhand. Instead of instant lovemaking he sat in the armchair and asked me to ring room service for coffee. There are no coffee-making facilities in the Holiday Inn; if you want any you have to ask them to bring it up, and however hard the staff try to look disinterested, professional and enigmatic, I have no doubt but they return to the kitchens and have the most animated conversations about myself and Hugo. Especially since Stef, on leaving, apparently shouted at the unfortunate girls in reception, ‘There are a pair of adulterers living it up in Room 301, and like as not paying only the single rate. I suggest you look into it!’ Or so the bellboy, trying to be helpful, told me. He is a pleasant lad, Jack, who brings up and takes down the many faxes that travelled between myself and Aura, Hugo and the Independent.
Hugo then took out a packet of cigarettes and smoked one. The entire third floor was designated as a non-smoking area. They ask at reception when you book in. ‘You haven’t started smoking again!’ I said in surprise.
‘The first one for six years,’ he said. ‘The strain of all this is getting to me.’
Now this disappointed me. Naturally I wanted to be a source of happiness to him, not strain. Sensing my reaction, he put out his free hand and stroked mine. I didn’t remind him about the third floor being a smoke-free zone. Stef, I have no doubt, would have done exactly that. It’s all too easy to fall into a maternal role in any relationship – being either the good mother, or the bad mother – and it doesn’t do. (I write for Aura – I read Aura. I know these things. I have no choice.)
I told Hugo about Belinda’s visit, but not about Brenda’s letter; the burning of which now seemed to me a rather pointless exercise in deceit. Hugo’s actual presence dampened the smouldering mixture of anxiety and jealousy which I was learning to live with. Soon, I supposed, I would be so used to it I would hardly notice my changed state. Valerie-with-Lou and Valerie-with-Hugo would feel the same, though they were not. But just to have him sitting there, long-legged, loose-limbed, the two of us engaged in a common purpose, enfolded in a cloud of intimacy that now seemed as real out of bed as in it, gave me great pleasure.
Then he said, ‘I have something I ought to tell you, though Eleanor Darcy asked me not to.’ I felt myself shiver with apprehension, fear of what he was going to say, but it turned out to be nothing. ‘She even makes me turn the tape off and insists I treat it as off the record. She has revelations. All this stuff about Darcy’s Utopia is dictated to her, she claims, by a kind of shining cloud.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
‘Like God appearing to Moses in a burning bush, or the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed as a shining pillar?’ I asked. ‘If nothing else, Eleanor Darcy has delusions of grandeur.’
But Hugo did not laugh.
‘I was walking to the pub with her,’ he said, ‘and there was definitely a kind of light dancing round her head. I was dazzled.’ And I remembered how I keep writing about the luminosity of her flesh and I felt another kind of shiver, this one starting in the back of the neck and travelling downwards so that Hugo seemed to feel it too: his hand pressed more firmly on mine to quieten it.
‘Well,’ I said, as lightly as I could, ‘we’re all dazzled by Eleanor. But does the light come from God or the Devil? The Church is still arguing about St Joan’s voices and St Teresa’s visions. Whether they’d beatify you or burn you alive you never could be sure. Anyway,’ I added after a little, because he’d wanted my attention not my comments, my agreement not my doubt, and it was obvious on his face, ‘all this Utopia stuff, as you put it, is for you to deal with. I don’t know why she keeps going on about it to me. Me, I’m just human interest, women’s magazine. You’re the big time.’
‘I’ll have none of that professional rivalry from you,’ he said, relaxing. ‘Leave that to Stef. I’m really proud of the way you sent Stef packing. She causes trouble wherever she goes. She’s used to being the one in control. She’s the arch-manipulator of all time. I should never have married her.’
And we talked about other things than Eleanor Darcy and our coffee came up; and the waiter raised his eyebrows at Hugo’s cigarette, which I was glad to see he didn’t stub out but continued to smoke, defiantly. I like a man who is not frightened by waiters. And presently when Hugo and I found ourselves in bed, for once a little later than sooner, he said to me – ‘Together we remake the universe, you and I,’ and I knew what he meant. He’d had a vasectomy: I’d had my tubes tied: there was no way we could make children. But infusing our love was that sense of a further, deeper purpose than our pleasure alone, which comes so naturally when we’re young and fertile, and is not noticed till it’s gone. I wondered where it came from. It seemed hardly ours by right: it seemed like something given, but who was there to give it?
Later, I asked him where the shining cloud was located that spoke to Eleanor Darcy and he actually said, why, down the end of Brenda’s garden; the other side of the fence, in a little copse just this side of the railway embankment. And I laughed again but, remembering the uneasy vividness of the afternoon she and I had tried to talk in the garden and the tape had failed to record, felt less like laughing.
‘She calls it Darcy’s Utopia, surely,’ I said, ‘because it was all part and parcel of Julian Darcy’s mad scheme to reshape the economy.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Hugo. ‘A great many of Darcy’s ideas came from Eleanor. He was obviously very much under her thumb. And the ideas are not as mad as you might suppose.’
And Hugo, I knew, though he couldn’t bring himself quite to say so, was beginning to feel Eleanor’s ideas came from the Supreme Being, the Prime Mover: that they were more than notions – they were instructions.
‘You know what she told me?’ said Hugo. ‘She told me we should not see ourselves as God’s children, but as God’s parents. We are not the created, but the creators. What we have to do is be worthy of the love offered us by our creation.’
And I laughed for the third time, and said, ‘Well, I’d have more trouble than the Apostles ever did cleaning up Jesus’s act, let alone the Companions with Mohammed, in trying to present Eleanor Darcy to the readers of Aura as saint and/or messenger.’
And I kept to myself the notion that God must work in an exceedingly mysterious way, in choosing so flawed and cracked a vessel as myself to record Eleanor Darcy’s life, obliging me to write it while myself trapped in a state of most acute sin — if we were to look at it traditionally, which I had no intention of doing, or through Lou’s beady eyes, or Stef’s manic ones, or the puzzled eyes of the five children Hugo’s and my love for each other affected – so mysterious indeed as to make you think we were much more likely to be talking about the Devil than of God. But I didn’t say that to Hugo. I wanted him there beside me on the king-size Holiday Inn bed and that was that.