am sure the world is full of women who would appreciate a pleasant, hard-working man with regular habits, and would be happy to babysit Sophie and Ben.
What do the children expect of me? I brought them into the world. Isn’t that enough? In another ten years they can come and visit me to their hearts’ content and I won’t object. Unless Ben remains a computer freak—he has his father’s appreciation of the mathematics, the square lines, the patterning out of existence; unless Sophie fails to lose a little of her egoism—or unless Hugo objects to their visits. I’m sure I don’t want his puny little creatures visiting me. I want his life to have begun the moment he met me, as he wants mine to have begun, simultaneously. Together, we exist. Separately, we are nothing.
LOVER AT THE GATE [7]
Brenda finds Ellen in a state of enchantment
BRENDA KNOCKED ON ELLEN’S door, nervous of what might happen next, anxious to know in detail what her friend Ellen had been unable to voice on the phone. Ellen opened the door wearing household gloves, her underwear and a wrap.
‘The kitchen sink is blocked,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to clear it with the plunger.’
‘Has he gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Brenda. ‘I forget—is it the Chancellor who does all the work in universities, or is it the Vice Chancellor?’
She knew about polytechnics, not universities.
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Ellen, returning to the sink.
Brenda followed, and gratefully sat down at the kitchen table. Her pregnancy rendered her unexpectedly top-heavy: no matter how she tried to balance back on her heels, she kept feeling that she was about to topple forward. Ellen made no comment on Brenda’s state. Usually she at least went through the motions of expressing concern, and of sharing some of the apprehension and excitement of the pregnancy. But today, Brenda could see, the talk was to be all of Ellen. She was sorry for herself, but happy for her friend, whose life in the last few years, while Brenda’s went forward into the tumult of marriage and babies, had become predictable, unambitious and, to Brenda’s mind, surprisingly dull: as if Ellen’s peculiarly bright and individual life flame was losing its incandescence: that the sheer everydayness of married life to the difficult Bernard—Brenda, Belinda and Liese all agreed that Bernard was ‘difficult’, with his passions, his principles, his politics and policies—and though they marvelled at the ease with which Ellen, as they put it, handled him, had somehow expected something more dramatic, more marvellous, for their friend, than that she should, as they felt she did, stand round kitchen sinks all day, taking a little job here, a little job there, failing to make any impression on the world at all. When they asked her what she was doing with her life, she would reply ‘thinking’, which seemed a singularly flaky answer.
Now as Ellen stood at the sink, working the rubber plunger in, out, in, out, listening and watching in the dirty water for the signs of vacuum working, of pressure releasing, the shoulder of her blue housecoat fell down and Brenda was startled by the white luminosity of her flesh.
‘The Vice Chancellor,’ said Ellen, ‘is the chief executive officer of the university. The Chancellor is merely its figurehead. A position of great dignity, of course, but you only really have to work once a year, when you spend a week or so conferring degrees. The Vice Chancellor is the one who really counts. Bridport is a small, efficient, research-orientated, cost-effective university in the new mode, which specializes in the philosophical and economic sciences, and its Vice Chancellor works extremely hard and has little time for personal life.’
‘Did he tell you all that?’
‘Yes. He said he felt it was appropriate to present his credentials at the beginning of the courtship. He said he hoped I didn’t find him hopelessly old-fashioned.’
‘And did you?’
‘I thought he was rather sweet.’
‘You said he was old and fat.’
‘Yes but his mind, Brenda. A mind makes up for such a lot.’
‘Bernard has a mind, Ellen.’
‘Eleanor. Julian Darcy called me Eleanor. First I had to put up with Apricot because of my crazy parents, then Ellen when Bernard was trying to punish me and make me share his guilt—now at last I have been invested with some kind of romance, of unearthliness. You know Julian is a member of one of the government’s think-tanks?’
‘I don’t keep up with these things.’
‘You should. He’s a very busy man. When he’s not running the university, or