the power of the curse than the fact of your own selfishness, unlikeability, destructive bad temper and so forth. Just as it is easier to blame witches, agents of the Devil, for male impotence, famine, drought, war, plague and so forth than it is to blame God whom, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we insist on regarding as a benign and even moral being.
Q: You keep coming back to God and the Devil. Why?
A: So would you if you’d seen the Devil, snarling and slavering and trying to get in a window of the second floor of a students’ residence. Even through the double glazing the glass was beginning to melt and you could hear this horrible panting sound.
Q: I thought you said your husband had seen the Dark Thing?
A: I saw him in Bernard’s face. If you believe in the Devil you had better believe in God, or else what a fix you’re in! If you have finished your coffee I think it is time you went. I find myself very tired today, I don’t know why. There is very little to do here; idleness quickly makes one tired. At least I expect that’s it. I never answered your question about loving two men at once. Isn’t it strange that men never seem to wonder whether it’s possible to love two women at once? They usually say to the old love about the new, ‘I love you but am in love with her,’ meaning that their nature is divided: their protective and uxorious souls reach out for the old love: their sexuality towards the new. I should consider that a little, if I were you.
And, as if she were the therapist and the journalist the patient, Eleanor ushered Valerie from the door. When Hugo, later that day, tested Valerie’s recorder he could find no fault with it. ‘You just forgot to switch it on,’ he said. Such as had been recorded was all but inaudible; though the sound of trains, children and wasps was clear enough. ‘I have never in all my professional life forgotten to switch the tape on,’ she said. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you have never in all your life been in love with a man as you are with me, yet it happened.’ And she was obliged to admit he was right.
Valerie ventures out of the Holiday Inn
I WAS TRYING TO make sense of my notes, and dabbing lotion on a nasty wasp sting on my finger, when Hugo turned up with the twins, two untidy little girls with red noses and pale wispy hair. They were, fortunately, not identical, though why I should be pleased they were unidentical I don’t know, as identical twins are conceived of the same coupling; unidentical very often of two separate couplings, and so far as I was concerned the less sexual congress Hugo and his Stephanie had the better. Stef was turning out to be very trying; she seemed unable to accept that one love can finish just like that—poof!—and a new one begin. She believed, wrongly of course, that Hugo was infatuated by Eleanor Darcy. The timing of his leaving would naturally suggest just such a conclusion.
‘Valerie,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll have to take these two to my mother again,’ at which the little ones set up an ungrateful wail, ‘but I’ll be back as soon as possible. I’m sorry but Stef is really behaving in an impossible way. The children were her idea, not mine.’
I set aside Lover at the Gate to attend to the children’s needs—Coke and hamburgers from room service soon quietened them. Stef, Hugo pointed out, was dead set against junk food. It is unwise for mothers to be too ideologically sound in matter of diet—it makes it so easy for rivals to the children’s hearts to worm their way therein, and win.
A taxi was called and Hugo and the children left for Liverpool Street and I was left alone with my own thoughts, in a state of mind I could only describe as lustless. It occurred to me that I should perhaps wait for my daughter Sophie outside her school, to make sure she understood that I had not abandoned her, had merely left Lou for a man who loved me and would make me happy; that things would presently calm down, and as soon as Hugo and I had sorted things out a little and established our new home she could join us. In the meantime she was