Hugo’s articles were received with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for pieces with titles such as ‘The Concept of Fiscal Negativity – a Long Hard Look’, that is to say, muted though respectful. Little by little his by-line dropped out of the columns altogether. I wondered what he was doing, and why, and where, but not for very long or very hard.
Lover at the Gate came out in Aura in serial form and won me another prize. ‘Best Fiction Biography of the Year’, a category devised, apparently, especially to meet the case. But no one interesting sat next to me at the Awards Dinner, and the decision went against publishing the work in book form, to my chagrin.
‘In a year’s time,’ my editor said, ‘everyone will have forgotten Eleanor Darcy. Pretty girls are only as interesting as the men they are with.’ And Eleanor was no longer with Julian Darcy. When he was released from prison she was not there to meet him; the media observed it, and forgot it. Julian was offered a top appointment with one of the larger banks, and accepted it, which event struck up a short-lived flurry of indignation and hilarity: when Georgina returned to him he was granted in the public mind a kind of forgiveness. But no one, it seemed, thought of Eleanor any more. My editor was right.
The house where I had interviewed Eleanor Darcy had somehow burned an impression of itself onto my eyelids. I’d see it when I closed my eyes: the most ordinary house in the world, except I’d given up thinking of houses, let alone people, as ever being ordinary. Let us just say there were many like it: semidetached, with a little square garden in the front, a rather longer one at the back; a house without pretension – just a place to live and think yourself lucky, as vibrant or dreary as its occupants.
I’d called Brenda from time to time but received no reply. I assumed she’d gone away. I wanted, without reason, to see the house again; and one day, without reason, other than that I was between assignments and both children were staying with Lou’s mother and it was eighteen months to the day from my first setting eyes on Hugo Vansitart, I drove over to the house, half remembering the way but having to consult the road map. I parked outside. The one good thing about these long, long, suburban streets is that there is usually somewhere to park. The house was empty, as I had expected. There was a ‘For Sale’ sign outside. After Loony Sunday and the resultant sudden surge in house sales, as everyone swapped over and moved to be next to jobs and friends, the market had stuck again. I had not expected its desolate look. The side gate which had barred Brenda’s children from running out onto the road swung open, off one hinge. Someone had pinned up net curtains in the front windows; an attempt, no doubt, to persuade robbers that the house was in fact occupied when it was not. I went up the side path and through into the back garden where I’d once had so unsatisfactory a tea with Eleanor Darcy. Then I had been besieged by wasps, children, passing trains; I had been assailed by the noise, the chaos, of everyday events. I had longed for order and been given none. I had felt thoroughly disrupted. Now there was nothing but silence and I didn’t like it. The signalling light up the railway line was stuck at red. I wondered again, as I often had, about the ‘dazzling light’ out here which Hugo had spoken of. I wondered if Eleanor and Brenda had rigged up some kind of spectral light machine the better to bamboozle him. It is hard, really hard, for the sceptical to give up their scepticism. It is even harder to believe than to love. How cruel Ellen was, in retrospect, to Bernard: not for leaving him, which may indeed in the end have been a kindness, but for mocking faith right out of him.
I walked down the garden towards the low back fence: on the other side of which was a width of wild, nettled ground before the steep gravelled slope of the railway track began. I hopped over the fence – these days I wear jeans and trainers: I have given up little suits and pumps, much to Sophie’s disapproval; my daughter likes to keep the differential going. I looked for, but found no wires, no bits of metal, no gauze for ectoplasm, just a kind of – how can I put it? – absence. A negativity. Wet nettles brushed the back of my hand. The leaves were rusty: there was not much sting left in them. I got back over the fence. The garden, naturally enough, was unworked and untidy, but still retained its trampled, overused, flattened air, as if even a year’s rest from small children had not been enough to get the processes of growth properly underway. Nothing, it seemed, had quite recovered from the withdrawal of whatever it was that had been there. What had Eleanor once said? What a fine fellow the Devil is, all fire and sparks and energy, but temporary? You only knew what you’d encountered by the permanent wasteland left behind, all that was left after, in such a rush, he’d sucked up that amazing burst of life. I wished I had not remembered that.
I went next door and knocked. I asked the woman who answered if she had a forwarding address for her erstwhile neighbours. She was stocky, forthright, and middle-aged: her leg was grossly swollen and wrapped in loose bandages. She wore slippers.
‘Thank God they’ve gone,’ she said, as if she spent her days waiting for the enquiry. ‘At last a little peace and quiet! All those people forever knocking at her door, all thinking they were going to be healed, that nothing would hurt any more. That woman was no healer. I took my leg to her and I’ll swear it made it worse. But try telling that to them. They believe what they want to believe.’
‘You don’t know where she went?’
‘She ran off with a BMW salesman, so they say. Just up and left one day. The nice one, the one with the children, left soon after. I did hear she’d moved around the corner into Mafeking Street. I can’t think why. It’s much the same as here. I don’t know what number; I don’t go out much. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.’ She lied. She was not at all sorry, but she was obviously in pain and Eleanor Darcy had failed her, so I forgave her.
I found my way to Mafeking Street, some half a mile distant. I was conscious that had I done my research for Lover at the Gate with any integrity I would know the street intimately. But I had not done so. I have relied on my intuition: that is to say I was not going to waste time on facts while Hugo was in my bed and Eleanor Darcy in my imagination. I was relieved to see that the street was exactly as I had imagined it. I came into it halfway along its length, where it was bisected by Union Street. It was a long road of semidetached houses, two up, two down, most in desultory repair, many lace-curtained, some, although small to begin with, converted into flats. Few of the cars which lined both sides of the street were new: most were clean and better kept than the houses; quite a few the kind that young men like to tinker with, to keep on the road in the face of all odds. I could see a couple of motorbikes; a clutch of bicycles leaning against a fence: a group of children, a couple of black faces amongst them, playing ball in the road, able to do so because this was a street which was a throughway to nowhere: on the corner where I stood was an Asian newsagent – it was empty of customers; closed until evening, no doubt, when the employed would begin to drift home from work. People of no aspiration could live here all their lives, and women married to men without aspiration, and I supposed vice versa, and forget easily enough that there was anything to aspire to.
I stood unsure of what I was looking for. Perhaps I hoped to find Brenda out walking with the children, or to run into Eleanor Darcy herself. Perhaps, I thought, if I knocked on another door someone would help. I had come a long way to go home with no reward. I wondered which way to walk, but both ways seemed equal. I started to go west, but the same sun which shone on deserts and mountains, baked the wide steps of city halls, glazed the air in gracious parks, shone into my eyes in Mafeking Street and dazzled me. So I turned my back on it and went east, and in the shadowed end of the street saw movement, people clustering in groups, and I was both disconcerted and pleased, because there seemed more of them than the houses around could possibly disgorge, and because here at last was a sense of event, of gathering together, of something about to happen. A minibus passed me by, and a coach. I walked towards the source of activity: there were men, women and children here. Why were they not at work, not at school? What was so important that kept them away? They were of all races, all classes: the kempt and the unkempt, the rich and the poor, but mostly those in between. They were devout, I could tell that – something mysterious and important was going on here – but not the black-shawled devout who all over the world mourn and murmur at shrines and pray for forgiveness: a sous-surrous of grief and reproach to rise to heaven: no, they were the kind who have library tickets in their wallets and cinema stubs in their pockets, and they are a multitude, stronger than they know.
I saw that they were waiting to go into a house, rather larger than the other ones in the road, and detached, which had been turned into a meeting hall. Outside was a wooden boarding, and on it was painted the words ‘The Darcian Chapel (16), Mafeking Street Branch’, and underneath that a poster, on which, handwritten, was the inscription ‘Today’s meeting: 4 p.m. Pastor: Hugo Vansitart. Subject: The Fiscal and the Self.’ I stood and stared at it, trying to take this remarkable sight in, and while I stared a Rolls-Royce pulled up, chauffeur driven. The door opened and Hugo stepped out: he wore a grey suit and a crimson cravat. Many in the crowd, I had noticed, wore just such crimson scarves. Hugo did not see me. I was one of many, and glad, at least for the moment, to remain so. He went into the chapel: the crowd followed, jostling, joking, their faces eager with expectation. No sombre religion this.
I stood at the back of the chapel and listened. I wondered if I should make myself known to Hugo, after the service, but thought I would not. I could not afford to have so much life force stirred up in me again. I would not survive it. And perhaps nothing at all would be stirred up in him. I could not face that.
Around me people chanted. They sang some kind of hymn to Utopia: there were no word sheets, but no hesitation in the singing either. It was a variation, from the sound of it, of the old Fabian hymn ‘Earth Shall be Fair, and All Men Glad and Wise’. The Darcian Movement had, I supposed, been going for some time, Hugo its founder member, this branch the sixteenth of how many? A religion for the new world, already thriving, unnoticed by those who ought to do the noticing – myself, and my agitated, agitating colleagues.
Age after age our tragic empires rise,
Built while we sleep
And in that sleeping dream...
And where was Eleanor Darcy? Was she here in the spirit? Did Hugo truly believe? I thought yes, he probably did. The Rolls-Royce was not necessarily a symbol of ostentation, merely that he needed to travel comfortably in order to preach the better.
Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep
Earth might be fair and all men glad and wise.
Men to incorporate women, of course. The greater to include the lesser. How could you ever tell when Eleanor Darcy was joking, or when she was serious? Babies aborted compulsorily in the womb! If she heard a voice on that one, it came from either the Devil or a God so rational as to be one and the same. I struggled with my scepticism. How wonderful, how easy, to believe. If only I could.
The hymn was finished. Hugo spoke.
‘Sisters and brothers,’ he said, ‘in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and was made flesh and dwelt among us, and of her fullness we have all received, and of her grace. And we asked her, what art thou? Prophet? And she replied I am the daughter of music, and the spouse of the wise, and I bring a new light into the world, of the world and for the world, that there shall be no heaven but here on earth – and that if you keep my commandments this heaven, this Utopia, shall be yours.’
No, I thought. I can’t. I want to but I can’t. I know too much. Eleanor didn’t issue commandments. Hugo has put them in. I have done my bit. She can’t ask any more of me. I slipped out. I closed the door behind me. I turned to walk to the corner where I had left my car. A movement in the back of the Rolls-Royce caught my eye. The window was open. I looked inside. Leaning back in the far corner was an attractive woman: she was buffing her fingernails. She moved forward, but I could not recognize who it was, though I saw her face clearly, if briefly. I didn’t want to appear inquisitive, so I walked on, found the car, and drove home. Afterwards I thought, but that was Eleanor Darcy; or at any rate, I couldn’t say it wasn’t Eleanor Darcy. I puzzled about it, but not very hard, or for very long. I thought she would approve of that. I could not become uncritical; I could not ever come to worship and adore Eleanor Darcy as Hugo did, but I could sure as hell admire her spirit.
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