Darcy's Utopia (25 page)

Jack the bellboy had brought the letter, addressed to Hugo, up to Room 301. Hugo wasn’t there. Jack offered to take the envelope down to room service and steam it open. Valerie accepted the offer, recognizing a woman’s hand.

She is now talking of buying a new car, a BMW, and the man from the garage calls her Alison—always a sign that she’s about to be off. I’ll be sorry when she goes. I know I’m just the one in Apricot’s life who brings in the coffee and takes the clothes to the cleaners—but all the same she brings a kind of light with her, and what she has to say is interesting: there’s a lot in it, though it’s sometimes hard to tell when she’s joking and when she isn’t.

I’m writing because I want to put my point of view. I take this business of Utopia seriously, and I want you to do the same. Not Darcy’s Utopia; that’s Apricot’s crazy vision: but let’s say Brenda’s Utopia, a kind of toned-down version of Apricot’s. I want a world fit for my kids to grow up in. Look, I want a world fit for
me
to grow up in. I don’t want us to go back to anything, I want us to go forward to something. I want to believe that my daily life has a purpose which is more than just me. I used to be a real peacenik during the crazy time when we all thought we’d be pulverized by nuclear war, that the future was just rubble. I’d stand around in the town square with banners, with a lot of chalk marks on the ground for bodies, scaring everyone; saying if we don’t do something we’ll all be dead. And that really kept me going, believing I was right and everyone else was wrong. In fact the more wrong I could make them be, the more right I’d be. Those days, in retrospect, were dead easy. It was dead easy. Then Gorbachev came along and swept the ground from under our feet: and it began to look as if we had a future after all, but if so, what was it going to be? And we hadn’t got a thing worked out, not a thing. Down here in the outer suburbs we just sort of stand about, dazed, trying to make a living, and having babies (if you’re me) because it’s the only positive single thing we can think of to do, and even that’s suspect because the world can’t stand the weight of its population any more. Who can you work for who isn’t corrupt? Where can you go to get out of a climate of lies and hypocrisy? I want to rebuild the world, and I’m stumped as to how to do it: but at least Apricot is trying. When you write your articles don’t laugh her out of court completely. And a word of warning—though I suspect it’s too late—people who have anything to do with Apricot do seem to keep getting into emotional muddles: she’s a love-and-muddle carrier, the way some people are typhoid carriers. I’m inoculated from it, by virtue of general running exhaustion, I daresay, and the effort of trying to make ends meet can de-sex a girl fast. I do worry sometimes about Pete. Now he’s a mini-cab driver, he meets so many new people, women out shopping with money to spare and a whole lot of them are going to be better-looking and more lively and better conversationalists than me. And we do, the three of us, sit down to supper in the evening. Though perhaps Pete is safer on the road than he ever was at the poly. That place was a
hotbed
. I was relieved when Pete was made redundant; the shock waves from the closure of the media communications department just kept on coming. Jed was the only one who seemed to survive. I’m just saying beware: keep your hands on the steering wheel, your eyes on the road. The fever goes when Apricot departs, and you can be left in an awful mess. That’s all for now. With best wishes,

Brenda Steele

Valerie had some trouble finding matches to burn Brenda’s letter; she went down to the hotel bar for the first time, ordered a drink and purloined a cigarette lighter; returned to 301, used the bathroom basin as a grate, and put the ashes down the WC.

I
T WAS SHORTLY AFTER
Graduation Week that Julian turned to Eleanor and said, ‘That went very well, my dear. Surprisingly well, in fact. Do you think we should be married as soon as my divorce comes through?’

Eleanor said, ‘I think that would be a very good idea indeed, Julian.’

‘You’re not,’ he said, ‘by any chance actually married to your Bernard? I take it you tied no formal knot?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ said Eleanor. ‘He was a Catholic and I wasn’t. Marriage was out of the question.’

‘More fool Bernard,’ said Julian. ‘You are everything a man could want, even a man such as me. How wonderful it is when a clever, competent and organizing head sits upon a body as young and supple and glamorous as yours.’

They went through a quiet marriage ceremony when Julian’s divorce came through. Eleanor said she wanted no big splash; she saw it just as the tying up of loose ends.

‘You didn’t ask me,’ said Brenda, ‘and I’m not surprised, considering, just a little hurt. So you’ve actually done it. Little Apricot Smith has turned into Eleanor Darcy and has the ear of the most powerful man in the kingdom and can murmur into it whatever she likes, any time, albeit bigamously.’

‘Well,’ said Eleanor, ‘at some times of day and all times of night.’

‘And Julian is in good moral, physical and mental health?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Eleanor. She was arranging flowers in a crystal bowl. She had a real gift for it. Sun streamed in through open windows. Soon it would be time for the coming year’s Graduation Week ceremonies. This time round she would not ask her friends to help out. There had been some comment on the standard of waitressing. A one-eyed girl behind the teapot was not, she had come to realize, what proud parents wished to see. They wanted the occasion unblemished by thoughts of the real world, from which their children were this very day escaping.

Eleanor was not speaking the exact truth to Brenda. Julian’s heart kept missing a beat. He was doing too much. The campus doctor told him it was stress: the condition was usual enough, not damaging to the heart, but a sign perhaps that he should slow down a little.

‘Of course, you’ve got a young wife,’ he said, jokingly. ‘I’ve known that carry off many a man in his prime.’

Julian reported the conversation to Eleanor.

‘What a very old-fashioned doctor,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the campus doctor of a young thrusting university should have a young thrusting attitude to life, and be rather better informed. Research shows the more sex you have, the healthier you are.’

Julian startled her by asking to see chapter and verse of the research. Every now and then she forgot and thought she was still married to Bernard. She found some published research which at least said that sexually active men were twenty per cent less prone to heart attack than the sexually inactive. Julian said twenty per cent wasn’t very reassuring. To avoid temptation he would sleep in a spare room for a day or two.

‘It’s not that I don’t want you,’ he said to Eleanor, ‘it’s that I daren’t. And I have a convocation in the morning; a faculty lunch, and golf with John Hersey of the polytechnic in the afternoon. We have to get a few things settled in the trans-binary field. And of course Downing Street next Wednesday, and an article on the Europeanization of the pound sterling still to be written.’

‘Julian,’ said Eleanor, ‘it occurs to me that things other than our sharing a bed make your heart miss a beat.’ But Julian found that hard to believe. If the heart misbehaves, the principle of Ockham’s razor suggests that affairs of the heart can only be to blame.

While Julian was at his convocation, Eleanor most civilly received a journalist from the
Daily Mail.
Normally, when the time for the three-monthly Downing Street meetings approached, no matter how they clustered, journalists would be kept from the door.

‘In matters of economic science,’ Julian would say, ‘the layman knows nothing, assumes much and fears more. All the press ever does is compound that ignorance, folly and fear; deliberately it fosters mistrust of change. Therefore, Eleanor, when faced with the ladies, gentlemen and guttersnipes of the media, let it be our policy to remain silent. Besides which, I’ve had murmurings in my ear in high places, and I can tell you this, mum is very much the word at the moment.’

In the high places of both government and academia, it seemed, messages came in the form of words in ears, little snippets fed out over dinner, or over the telephone from which the minds of those at the top of the pyramid of power could be construed by those further down. Eleanor would lie in bed watching Julian pull on his socks, with their thin little snappy red suspenders, and marvel at his villainous urbanity. He made her smile. She loved him. His mind rather than his haunches, which were, granted, a little flabby, turned her on. She always got up later than he did. She loved to watch and listen, and he loved his audience. He would go down to the kitchen and put on the coffee and toast: she would follow. The staff were not required to start work until 9.55 in the morning, thus allowing the happy couple their privacy. It meant the staff seldom finished until eleven at night, for every detail of the spontaneous breakfast must be prepared in advance, from time-setting the microwave for .25 of a minute at fifty per cent power to soften the butter; to grinding the coffee beans at the last possible moment to avoid any loss of flavour. Julian would be in his office by ten, relaxed, happy, accustomed to adoration, expecting more, and unworried by the necessity of making decisions, inasmuch as he knew they would be the right ones.

But now Julian’s heart had missed a beat, and he mistook the reason, and Eleanor was encouraged, and said to Freddie Howard of the
Daily Mail
, ‘Yes, by all means. I should be happy to be interviewed. If you believe that the home life of the Vice Chancellor of Bridport might be of interest to your readers, on your head be it. You’ll find us very dull, I’m afraid.’

Freddie Howard arrived at twelve in the morning. Eleanor wore black leggings and a silky top, which showed both legs and top to advantage. At that time she assumed a long-legged, supple, Jane Fonda look; hair plentiful and curly about the head. The spirit of Georgina still hovered about the house, as the spirit of first wives is wont to do, leaving some indefinable reproach behind, lurking in eggcups or under saucepan lids, and Eleanor took care to resemble her predecessor as little as possible the better to outwit her, exuding a young energy rather than a cool elegance. She offered him champagne and asked Mrs Dowkin to bring in ‘some of the caviar snacks, you know, the kind I love. I’m sure you will too.’ She ate at least a dozen of the piled biscuits when they arrived, her little even white teeth greedy—he ate two, one to try and the next to reaffirm he didn’t like true caviar at all: he preferred the lumpfish kind. He was a fleshy, saturnine man in his early forties, normally sent out on heartbreak stories. He was known to be good with women; they’d tell him anything.

‘I’m only a wife,’ Eleanor said, ‘and of course I’m not trained in economics. But economics is only a matter of common sense, isn’t it? I like to think I give Julian confidence—that’s the main thing.’ Freddie asked what she thought Julian’s advice to the PM would be, in this time of crisis.

‘Is there a crisis?’ asked Eleanor, calling for more champagne. ‘Down here at Bridport we don’t notice much. Yes, I believe the academic staff are on a work-to-rule, something about wages and inflation: but they’re never contented, are they? And they have such long holidays! Why can’t they do two jobs, if they’re short of money?’

‘Let them eat cake,’ murmured Freddie.

‘I never understood why poor Marie Antoinette got such stick for saying that,’ said Eleanor. ‘It seems a perfectly good suggestion to me, though cake’s not very good for you. Eggs, sugar, butter and so forth. Bread’s healthier, I agree. Of course,’ added Eleanor, ‘Julian’s salary is inflation linked, so inflation doesn’t affect us particularly. He got a hundred and twenty thousand pounds last year and a hundred and fifty this. Everyone should be really careful about their contracts, these days. I think if there’s a message he’d want to give everyone it would be this: “Watch your contract!”’

‘Now unemployment is surging up again, the workforce may find that difficult,’ observed Freddie, writing busily.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘Julian’s view is that money itself is the problem with the economy. Most people would be far better off with none at all.’

‘Do you have a pet name for him?’ asked Freddie.

‘I call him Rasputin,’ said Eleanor.

The photographer arrived, late and dusty, as press photographers normally do. He looked Eleanor up and down and said, ‘This is better. I thought it would have to be a desk-shot. Typical Vice Chancellor stuff. The best background you ever get in academia is an ivy wall.’

He posed her sitting perilously on the stone balcony, with the hills behind, and the breeze playing through her curly hair, head thrown back and long legs to advantage. ‘Oops!’ she kept crying as he kept snapping. ‘Nearly fell that time!’ Freddie went on pouring more champagne, and she went on pouring it over the wall but Freddie didn’t notice that. ‘Natural light!’ the photographer rejoiced. ‘Natural light and no ivy, no books. You’ve made my day.’

When Julian came home from playing golf he found Eleanor in tears. She said she’d let a journalist in—he’d pressured her and she’d somehow been manoeuvred into it—and she just knew he was going to make everything up; and a photographer had come along and snapped her as she sat on the wall playing ball with Mr Dowkin’s son.

‘Playing ball?’ enquired Julian. ‘Playing ball—?’

‘I do sometimes,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t know, Julian. You’re always in your office or running the world. And my legs were showing, I just know they were.’

‘Eleanor,’ said Julian, ‘this doesn’t sound like you.’

‘It’s because I’m so tired and miserable,’ she said. ‘If you’re not in my bed I can’t sleep. My judgement is all to pieces. I need you as much as you need me. How was golf?’

‘Bad,’ he said. ‘My heart was all over the place. The word from above is that trans-binary adjustments across the PCFC and UFC are out. They keep changing the goal posts. Now I doubt we’ll be able to asset-strip the polytechnic, even if they lie down and ask us to.’