kind who eats fish, so should the cat be—his real motive to irritate his father, who was daily irritated.
I missed the hassle, the subdued indignation of a woman who, her husband insisting on a ‘sit-down breakfast for the family’ and not one taken merely on the wing, on the grounds that a family that eats together stays together, has on that account to spend twenty minutes every morning getting up and down from her chair, fetching fresh coffee, making more toast, answering the phone, removing the cat from the table, irritating that same husband every time she does so, because he likes peace while he eats. Must have peace, he, the creative artist, having barely recovered from last night’s concert, already tense about the next. Why of all times of day should I miss this particular dreadful hour? Had there been some real achievement here, after all, in the ritual sopping up of breakfast aggro in the interests of happy family life? Which seems so often, in spite of all theory and effort, to be the maternal and not the paternal role? When I had finished Lover at the Gate I could perhaps persuade the editor of Aura to run a piece on the problem; I didn’t want to write it myself—I just wanted to know; to be told, for once, what everything was all about, not to be the one who did the telling.
The pages of Lover at the Gate mounted steadily beside my printer. As the pile grew higher, so it seemed to me, little flickers of interest in the outside world returned. I both longed to finish it, yet dreaded the finishing. What then? When Eleanor had let me go, if Eleanor let me go, what then?
LOVER AT THE GATE [8]
Bernard and Ellen part
A MONTH OR SO later Prune’s baby was stillborn—one of those apparently perfect babies who turn out to have failed to develop a brain—and Bernard said, ‘Nerina’s group ill-wished it.’ Ellen said, ‘That’s absurd. It was conceived with a genetic defect: its handicap predated the insult to Nerina.’ Bernard said, ‘Well, perhaps black magic groups can predate curses. How do you know they can’t?’ and Ellen replied, ‘You should have been Witchfinder General. You’d have picked out and burned a thousand witches,’ and Bernard was upset and insulted, feeling she was seeing him as reactionary when everyone knew he was a radical, a feminist, a reconstructed man, liberal in outlook, tolerant in behaviour, his heart and mind firmly in the right place. Ellen and Bernard were not getting on too well. The phone had gone a couple of times lately and a man, with a gravelly, upper echelon civil service note to his voice, rather than the serviceable tones of the locality and the polytechnic, had asked for Eleanor, and Ellen had taken the call on the extension.
‘Who was that?’ Bernard asked, too proud to listen in to the call. ‘He’s a man offering me a job up at the university,’ said Ellen. ‘You know I had my name down at the agency for temping work. I think I’ll take it.’
‘Why does he call you Eleanor?’
‘I put Eleanor on the form. I thought I might get paid more as Eleanor than as Ellen.’
They needed the money. The Inland Revenue had discovered a mistake in their accounting: they were demanding six hundred and fifty pounds from Bernard forthwith, which he did not have. He had bought No. 93 from the landlord at a good price, but now dry rot had appeared in the porch, and if not seen to soon would damage the fabric of the house. Wendy’s ghost made a dramatic appearance again, knocking Ellen’s contraceptive pills off the mantelpiece: drifting around the bedroom in a kind of orange glow, Ellen was prepared to call in a priest to exorcize it but Bernard said drearily it was all too late, too late. Bernard’s white shirts had somehow got in with a pair of Ellen’s red socks and were now a pinkish grey. He hated to be so sloppily dressed. All misfortunes were blamed upon Nerina. Nerina would sit in class staring at him, Bernard said, her steady brown eyes, half-reproachful, half-triumphant, plotting further troubles for him, big and little stabs of revenge. He slept too much, not too little: he was too desolate, too anxious for lovemaking. The curse of depression lay upon him: Ellen suggested lithium, which does so much to calm the manic-depressive temperament, but Bernard said lithium was no defence against