LOVER AT THE GATE [12]
Julian was to spend Wednesday at 11 Downing Street, in conference with the fiscal advisers to the Treasury. At two in the morning he stirred Eleanor awake.
‘These ceaseless problems with the economy,’ he said, ‘are because we’ve never had the nerve to do things properly. We’ve talked about cheap money,’ he said, ‘but we’ve never made it really cheap. We devalue the pound but only on paper. We use it to make people poor, not rich.’
‘Of course,’ said Eleanor, ‘to make the poor rich is to make the rich poor. That’s why we never do it properly.’
His fingers strayed over her breast. She thought of Sharif the beautiful. She wasn’t surprised Mrs Khalid had encouraged her daughter’s marriage. Now they were all bound together: like Rhoda to Wendy to Ken to herself to Bernard, and round again to one-eyed Gillian, for Ken would lose Gillian to Bernard; it was inevitable. And through Jed, through the joining of flesh, to Nerina, and all others before or since: except some seem to count, and some not to count, as did, or did not, death. Some deaths affect you: others don’t, for no reason that you can see. A close friend dies and not a feeling in you stirs: an acquaintance passes on: you weep and wail. As with death, so with sexual partners. Some count, some don’t. Jed counted and she hadn’t known it. If you knew it, would you do it? Most certainly you would. The connections are there to be made. They are foretold, inevitable. That’s why the pleasure goes with them: what you do is the fulfilment of fate’s will.
‘Think of me,’ said Julian, ‘think of me, not whatever you’re thinking of.’
‘I am thinking of you,’ she said.
‘What did you just say then?’ he asked.
‘To make the poor rich is to make the rich poor,’ she repeated. ‘That’s why we never do it properly.’
‘The creative approach to economics!’ he murmured, not without disparagement, into the dark. ‘But you’re right. Now if we were to make money really cheap – the Treasury just might do it. They have to do something. Shortages are endemic. It’s almost as bad in London now as it ever was in Moscow: if you want petrol you have to buy it out of someone else’s tank.’
‘That’s because the tanker men are on strike.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he said gloomily. ‘They were provoked into striking in order to mask the true situation, to give us time to think our way out of this one. We have no option but to jolt the economy. Electric shock it out of depression!’
‘You could always stand on street corners and give money away,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
‘It might do it,’ he said. ‘It just might do it. The old Keynesian way of work creation without the distorting effects of actually doing the work.’
He rolled over and went to sleep. She did not mind one bit. She dreamt of Sharif, which she seemed to be able to do to order. He beat her for her wickedness, and made her shroud herself in black robes as punishment, and she and Nerina shared a bed and he came to both of them while Mrs Khalid listened in the room next door. She had no choice. The house was small, the walls were thin: no wonder she bit her nails.
When Eleanor woke, luxurious and sated, Julian was pulling on his socks and suspenders. He was bright-eyed and elated.
‘It’s the answer,’ he said. ‘The answer! And thank God it’s one of those days when I could convince anyone of anything!’
And so it seemed it was: the meeting went on for only four hours of an anticipated six. The media, domestic and international, hovered outside the door both at Downing Street and Bridport Lodge. Eleanor was much photographed in mesh tights, but remained loyal, though, she felt, in some way coy.
‘If anyone can find a way,’ she found herself saying, unable to stop it, ‘my husband will. He’s a genius. He’s quite nervy, but that always goes with brilliance. He was hospitalized for depression when he was twenty-one. He had a course of ECG, which cured him. Just like Tom Eagleton: remember? McGovern’s running mate. Wasn’t that unfair, that whole business of being unfit for office because of a nervous breakdown? But it was all part of some smear campaign, wasn’t it?’
The think-tank emerged beaming from its meeting. A statement would be made on Monday. On Sunday morning at ten o’clock, without warning, the cash dispensers of the high street banks up and down the nation began to spew out notes. An hour of fives, an hour of tens, an hour of twenties. Then an hour’s pause. Then the cycle began again: neat packages of new notes slid gracefully, unasked, from under their tactful slots, on and on and on.
At first, as the press later reported – the home press subdued and embarrassed, the international press quite hysterical with glee – the public were nervous and suspicious: they kept their distance: then quickly the police arrived, suspecting a malfunction, to guard this enigmatic money supply from looters. As it so happened it was a wet and windy day: in many parts of the country the wind that so often whistles along the high streets whistled to good effect, and whipped wet notes over shops and into alleys and gardens and under the noses of the drunk, the wretched and the homeless, who on the whole disregarded them, understanding well enough that money was not the solution to their problems; what they needed was not to smell and to find someone to like them enough to be prepared to take them in. Word came from on high and the police went back to their headquarters: and, nervously, those who needed the notes to pay electricity and gas bills and mortgages began to gather them up and took them home to their children to count, and were thus relieved of anxiety, and smiled over the meal, and forgot to blame whoever was usually to blame, and made love to wives or husbands, as well as inclination or vigour would allow, and said to their children, okay, if you don’t want to go to school, don’t go: and to themselves, the job I do is pointless, useless; what is more I hate doing it and stayed in bed, and only those who thought, the job I do is valuable, others need me, depend upon me; I like doing it, went, and the traffic moved freely, because there was half the usual volume, and the petrol tanker men went back to work because, as their leader said that Monday morning, ‘Everything’s upside down; the government’s gone insane; we’d better not add to it.’
On Monday noon the machines stopped exuding money.
‘The fools,’ said Julian Darcy. ‘The fools. If they lose their nerve now, they’ve had it! Compromise, compromise! It will be the end of us!’
The move had been made on the strength of a majority of one, he told Eleanor. He had been eloquent in support of the action; others had supported it in theory but wanted time to think about it. An amendment had been moved but lost, to first educate the public, issue instructions; dole out money to the deserving poor, not undeserving: which, as Julian had pointed out, was no different than an increase in benefits: this faction had been defeated. Julian had argued for surprise, for the shock tactics which would jolt the economy out of depression, and he had won the day.
The fury of the country was very great indeed: though whether because it had happened or because it had stopped happening those who stood in the crowds in the public squares did not seem quite to know. The Prime Minister resigned: the EEC put in a stop-gap government of bureaucrats: martial law was briefly imposed: a new currency introduced, conforming to EEC standard. Although, as a few dissidents observed, the three hundred million pounds’ worth of notes which the corner banks had distributed had scarcely affected inflation rates at all. But it was not a popular thing to say. Public pride had been offended. To believe a nation could do without money! Somebody’s fault: Rasputin’s fault: Rasputin of Bridport, the genius who had nervous breakdowns, moved his young mistress into his wife’s bed, dined on champagne and caviar while firing his staff.
‘They’ll blame me,’ said Julian. ‘I know they will. A prophet is always dishonoured in his own country. I’ll be the fall guy. Why did you say that about my having shock treatment when I was twenty-one?’
‘Because it was true.’
‘You don’t love me, you never have. My troubles began when I first encountered you, when I came to your gate –’
‘The lover at the gate,’ said Eleanor, ‘comes for more than he knows.’
‘I should never have left Georgina,’ said Julian. ‘This is my punishment. In my own house I am not believed.’
‘In your own house you are believed,’ said Eleanor. ‘And it was a good time while it lasted.’
The police came in the early hours and took Julian away, giving him not even time to put on his socks and shoes. They made him wear his slippers. They had trumped up, it seemed, charges of tax evasion, corruption and waste of public funds. Eleanor followed him to the police cars in the drive. There were four of them, all flashing their lights in the dawn.
‘It goes against the grain to apologize,’ Julian said, ‘but I shouldn’t have said the hard things I did. I was upset. I love you very much. I don’t regret a minute of it. Two years’ perfect happiness is more than many a man has in his lifetime. But now the nation is humiliated in the eyes of the world and it seems I must pay the price for it. I wonder how many years I’ll get? Will I be allowed pen and paper?’
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’ll see you are. The nation mustn’t lose a genius. I’ll wait for you.’
And she smiled and waved encouragingly, though she knew she lied. There was no need for him to be more unhappy than he had to be.
Eleanor, pursued by the press, went first to stay with Jed and poor Prune, but Prune, who seemed to have regained her will and spirits, and was considering adoption, asked her to leave within the week. ‘It’s not just the media forever at the door,’ she said, ‘or you and Jed droning on about free money economics at the dinner table, or the way you sneer at my stews, it’s never knowing what you and Jed are up to. If Jed kept himself to himself more I’d get pregnant. He just wastes his energies.’
‘That’s hardly scientific,’ said Eleanor.
‘I don’t care what it is,’ said Prune. ‘You just leave me and Jed alone. Go and live with your husband.’
‘I can’t. He’s in prison,’ said Eleanor.
‘Where you put him,’ said Prune, ‘with your mad ideas. I mean your real husband, your proper husband, the one and only. You married poor Bernard to get away from home, but that’s your bed; you chose it, you lie in it.’
It seemed not a bad idea to Eleanor, who felt an unusual need for friends and family, but Gillian said she’d rather Eleanor didn’t come to stay, one way and another. Why didn’t she just go on swanning around up at Bridport Lodge? But Eleanor said she couldn’t: Georgina had returned with a battery of lawyers: the university was being merged into the polytechnic: the place hardly existed any more. It had no future role as the arbiter of national economic policy.
‘Oh dear,’ said Gillian, ‘you’ve come such a long way and ended up with nothing! At least Bernard and I have each other. He’s got quite a little business going selling fancy cars.’
‘He doesn’t know one end of an engine from another,’ said Eleanor.
‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Gillian. ‘He was born honest and people know it. That’s all that counts.’
But Gillian did let her round to see Ken. Last time she’d seen him he’d been wrapped in blankets because the gas bill had not been paid and the central heating had been cut off. But he’d been quick off the mark on Loony Sunday, as the media now referred to it, and all the bills were paid. The house glowed with heat and light. It had even been dusted. He was uninterested in Eleanor’s predicament, or the events which had led up to it. A jazz band, circa 1925, was in performance on the television. He did not turn the volume down.
‘I lost Gillian to your Bernard,’ he said, loudly and cheerfully. ‘Can’t say I mind much. She goes on looking after me. Tell you what, I tottered round to No. 93 the other day. It’s been sold at last. Loony Sunday saw to that. Saw your mother there, bold as brass, bright as day.’
‘Rhoda?’
‘No, not Rhoda, Wendy. Your mother.’
‘Did she speak?’
‘How could she? She was dead. She just stood there in a kind of pillar of light.’
‘Was she angry with you?’
‘Not particularly. Why should she be?’
Eleanor switched off the television.
‘Because you made her pregnant, failed to marry her, neglected her, drove her to drink and then married her mother.’
Ken considered. ‘It’s one way of looking at it,’ he said, ‘but not the way I do. Personally, I blame Rhoda.’
He turned the television on again, but Eleanor thought he looked a little shaken. She was glad.
Belinda was cool on the telephone and said, ‘Frank really had a hard time over that stupid money business. It was beneath his dignity to go round picking up money from the street and now everyone’s paid off their mortgage but him. Whatever was Julian thinking? It’s distorted everything and Frank’s furious. You struggle and struggle and suddenly what’s it all about? I don’t think it’s really sensible for you to come to stay, Ellen.’
Brenda said Eleanor was more than welcome to stay as long as she wanted, but perhaps she should wait until the media attention had cooled down a little, and the trial was over: she wasn’t too keen on having the children exposed to the full glare of publicity; she wanted them to live simple lives. Eleanor said she thought it was very likely they would, and took up Liese’s offer of her holiday home; a pretty, simple house in the Forest of Dean. Here she sat out Julian’s trial. Julian was acquitted of tax evasion but found guilty of misuse of public funds – the hospitality offered at Graduation Week events seen in retrospect as grossly extravagant – and was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Eleanor, in the healing tranquillity of nature, for the space of a year, kept her silence before returning to civilization and ordinary society, and most generously offering the story of her life to you, the readers of Aura.
Of her spiritual journey during that year she remains silent: it must be left to someone other than myself, Valerie Jones, to record and communicate. It is my part to write the gospel only of the early years.