Valerie Jones returns to ask further questions of Eleanor Darcy
Q: TELL ME ABOUT your educational background. Were there books in your house? Did your parents encourage you to read?
A: What you want me to tell you is how I, victim of a class-ridden society, managed to escape the long side streets of the outer suburbs and reach the shores of academia. Well, a few of us manage it. It helps to have a high IQ, though I suspect a talent for mimicry is more useful; being able to adopt at will the tones and attitudes of the educated middle classes. That I have.
Valerie sat on the sofa. Eleanor sat in a chair. Why, Valerie wondered, did Eleanor share the sofa with Hugo, but not with her?
First, of course, you have to know what you are: that there is another life, another set of attitudes, other responses out there in the world, which prevent most of us from aspiring to better things. We know what we like, like what we know, unless something quite powerfully intervenes to shake us out of it. The child from the fish and chip shop can only end up running Liberty’s if he has some idea of what Liberty’s is. How very snobbish of you, you will say; why should Liberty’s be seen as superior to a fish and chip shop?
Q: I wasn’t conscious of accusing you. Aren’t you being a little defensive?
A: I daresay. I was married to Bernard Parkin for fifteen years, a man who came from the lower middle class, but identified quite violently, for a number of years, with the workers. He would never set foot in Liberty’s, let alone Harrods—those haunts of the rich and the would-be rich represented for him the scornful laughter of the haves towards the have-nots. While some downright starve, and others scrimp and save to afford the large cod and chips, not the small, a few spend thousands on sunken baths and antique rugs. Poor Bernard. He was a good man.
Q: Was?
A: One speaks of ex-spouses in the past tense. Don’t you do the same?
Q: I don’t have an ex-spouse.
A: No? Well, I daresay you will, from what Mr Vansitart tells me.
To cover her discomposure, Valerie readjusted the microphone. She was flattered and excited that Hugo had talked of their relationship to Eleanor: offended that her privacy had been thus violated. The pleasurable feeling won.
You have pushed the microphone out of range. Shall I adjust it? We live in a world of surplus but can’t bring ourselves to believe that we do. We go on behaving and thinking as if there would never, never be enough. Gimme, gimme, gimme! Before someone else gets it. My sunken plastic bath better than your old cast-iron tub. If the poor have their faces ground into a mud made sharp and painful by slivers of diamond and chunks of ruby, whose fault is that? Those who shove their faces into it?—Bernard’s view. The consistency of the mud?—my view. Or that of the poor themselves, for daring to bend their heads and stare?
Q: You went first to the Faraday Junior School, I believe, an ordinary state school. What were your experiences there?
A: I understand what you are saying. Badly born, poorly educated as I am, how do I have the nerve to pass comment on the society I live in—let alone marry a professor of economics and co-author with him—the publisher’s term, not mine—a book on Darcian Monetarism?
She rose from the chair. She paced. Today she wore a tan silk shirt and tight dun-coloured trousers. She had the air of a female terrorist: someone who might take it into her head to shoot at any moment. Valerie thought, Good heavens, it was safer, after all, on the Mail on Sunday than on Aura, earthquakes notwithstanding. This may yet be the end of me.
Q: No. I was not saying any of that. I was asking how you enjoyed school.
Eleanor calmed, sat down again.
A: Yes, I believe you were. I had a bad time at the hands of male journalists during Julian’s trial and in the period leading up to it: some residual paranoia sticks. They look for a femme fatale, a Mata Hari of world finance, a seductress. If a woman is to be taken seriously she must either be past the menopause or very plain, preferably both.
Let us return to the Faraday Junior School. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, we five-year-olds trooped off to school: troubled and sophisticated we returned, the stuffing all