He said, ‘But only in a supportive kind of way. We’ll get the balance right. We’re both workaholics. We’ll fuse.’
They had good office services at the Holiday Inn. They even provided us with word processors, IBM compatible; one each, it being a double room. I went down the road to Marks & Spencer for clothes. Mostly just satin slips and wraps and so on—I didn’t see myself going out much. What for? I called my number. Lou had put the answerphone on. The children would have got themselves to school. They were competent enough. My main function in the home, I remarked to Hugo, was as Witness to the Life. I left a message to say I had left home.
I gave my new telephone number to Aura, and settled down to love Hugo and prepare to write the life and times of Eleanor Darcy. Hugo went home once to fetch a suitcase, and was back within the hour. We did not wish to lose a minute of each other’s bodies, each other’s company, if it could possibly be helped. We had each other, we had our work, we had room service—what more did we need? We were well and truly happy. I had never felt the emotion before: nor, he said, had he.
From Valerie Jones’ first interview with Eleanor Darcy
A: I WILL NOT overburden you with my views on Darcy’s Utopia, the multiracial, unicultural, secular society the world must aim for if it is to have any hope of a future. I know you will simply leave it all out when you come to write your history of my life. I know you are concerned with what you call the human-interest angle, how I came to be who and what and where I am. But I have been created by a society interacting with a self: you can’t have one without the other. You will hold me up to other women as an example, how to start life in a back street as Apricot Smith, an untidy, misbegotten child; be promoted to Ellen Parkin, working wife of the ordinary down-at-heel hate-the-government kind; and to become the true love and wife of Professor Julian Darcy, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bridport.
You don’t care that Darcian Monetarism and the Bridport Scandal changed the thinking of nations: you just want to know how it was that in three decades God and the Devil between them managed to promote me from Apricot to Eleanor, by way of Ellen. And yes, it was promotion. As Eleanor Darcy I can go anywhere: it’s like a little black frock: you can dress it up with diamonds, dress it down with a cotton scarf: it always looks right. As Ellen Parkin I was only fit to run down to the corner shop in my slippers, or queue up for family benefit. And who would be interested in Parkin’s Utopia? Darcy’s Utopia has a much more convincing ring. Parkin smacks of small back streets and long-term illness—what’s left when the Devil has flown, sucking love out of you as he goes, leaving a burned-out patch behind. Names are magic, believe me. Better to be out of love as Eleanor Darcy than Ellen Parkin. The Ellen Parkins of the world love only once, and if it goes wrong give up.
Q: But you don’t change your nature by changing your name, surely?
A: Oh yes, you do. My advice to everyone is to change their name at once if they’re the least unhappy with their lives. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will choose a new name at seven, at eleven, at sixteen and at twenty-four. And naturally women at forty-five, or when the last child has grown up and left home, whichever is the earliest, will rename themselves. Then life will be seen to start over, not finish. It is a perfectly legal thing to do, even in this current fearful and unkind society of ours; no deed poll is required. So long as there is no intent to defraud, anyone can call themselves anything at all. But so many of us, either feeling our identities to be fragile, or out of misplaced loyalty to our parents, feel we must stick with the names we start out with. The given name is a dead giveaway of our parents’ ambition for us—whether to diminish or enhance, ignore us as much as possible or control us forever—and the family name betrays our social origins.