in the home is like trying to knead a piece of dough the size of a house: get it down here and it surges up there. Compared to all this employment is a piece of cake, yes indeed: or rather a nice firm crisp yeastless biscuit. And I take the view that those who employ me must take some of the blame when things go wrong. I am what I am—I do what I can. If I can’t, more fool them for asking me in the first place. And because I am not anxious, I do well. Me, Valerie Jones, Features Writer of the Year! The pleasure which suffuses out from between my agreeably bruised and battered loins is, when I can get round to defining it, the more intense for this unexpected infusion of worldly accomplishment. Valerie Jones, a success!
The trouble is I have committed myself, through my editor, to writing the life of Eleanor Darcy. I can’t take on the extra freelance commissions which will now come my way. On the very afternoon of the Media Awards Dinner I signed a contract with Aura undertaking to work exclusively on the project until delivery of the ms. Well, I will just have to work hard and get it done quickly. Fortunately, sex with Hugo takes up less time than, to be blunt, not-enough-sex with Lou. There is no time wasted teacup washing, dinner-party chatting, tense family-outering—the things we all do to pretend to ourselves and the world that there is more to marriage than sex. I can simply get into bed with Hugo and out of it to get on with Lover at the Gate, as Eleanor Darcy wishes the work to be called. I should feel guilt, remorse, doubt, distress, despair and so forth: I don’t. I should be in some kind of shock, but I am not. I should be debating the wisdom of my actions; I do not. I do not look into the future beyond the delivery of the manuscript. Why should I? Let the coins fall as they will: in due course it will become apparent whether they were heads or tails.
So if I get one or two things wrong in my account of Eleanor Darcy’s life, I tell myself, it will be her responsibility as much as mine. She chose Aura, Aura chose me. I repeat—I am what I am, I do what I can. Mrs Darcy does not make matters easier than she can help. I have the feeling she does not like me very much. She threw a few grains of fact at me during the course of the interview, as if she were scattering crumbs for a hopping sparrow. If I were working for the New Statesman or the Economist I would obviously have more interest in Darcy’s Utopia. I have in fact written pieces for both these publications. Because I am currently working for Aura does not mean I’m an idiot. I just need to know why her mother called her Apricot, and time is short, because both interviewer and interviewee get tired, and besides, I wanted to get home to Hugo.
Nor did she make things easy for me. Her voice is soft and low and she kept moving out of recording range. She once even said, ‘If it’s not on the tape, just make it up: it will be more interesting to your readers,’ which I thought rather insulting to me: certainly it made me feel diminished in my profession. Journalists are trained to report accurately what they are told, and to come to honest rather than convenient conclusions. We are, as Eleanor made me realize, alarmingly dependent on the veracity of our informants: we come to expect lies or half-lies in some few areas—age, or income, and those in public life will often fail to reveal their true opinions in their attempt to present an acceptable face to the world—but outside these areas the natural inclination of most folk is to speak the truth if they possibly can. They don’t speak of themselves and the world as if it were some kind of fictional creation which can be rewritten and subedited at will, as if one version of it were as valid as another. They do not normally pull visions of the Devil, as Mrs Darcy did in her interview with Hugo, out of a hat, to divert and deflect: they do not insist on fusing truth with Utopian notions, especially when they have the nerve to