‘Bernard,’ said Ellen, ‘are you sure you didn’t make a pass at her? If you ask me, only excessive guilt would make you quite so fanciful. Though it’s better to have this Nerina blamed for your pink shirts rather than me. If she didn’t exist I would have to invent her.’
‘Of course I didn’t make a pass at Nerina,’ said Bernard. ‘That might be the trouble. Jed did. Jed’s the kind to bed his best friend’s wife if he thought he’d get away with it. Jed has just got a senior lectureship and won a five-hundred-pound premium bond, and poor Prune’s baby is dead.’
Julian Darcy did not believe in curses. Julian would just have looked startled, even indignant, had Ellen seemed for one moment to give any credence to the powers of black magic. Black magic was for the credulous, the ignorant, the uneducated. Julian moved amongst the powerful of the land: the thought behind the Conference: the mind behind the Act. Julian had a benign and cultivated air. Julian took a sip of claret here, a glass of Perrier there: Julian made a trip to 10 Downing Street: Julian went up to a shoot in Scotland: Julian and Georgina gave a dinner party and who was guest of honour but the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his wife. After dinner, Ellen asked, when the guests had gone, when the house was quiet, when the mind was stilled, what then? No, Julian and Georgina had long since given up sex. They were friends, good friends, no more.
Julian’s conversation, when not about the beauty of Eleanor’s body, the freshness of Eleanor’s mind, was about recession and government intercession, exchange rates, the International Monetary Fund, and occasionally what minister was sleeping with what actress, and who had behaved shoddily pre-privatization and which member of the Stock Exchange was going shortly to be nailed for malpractice. Julian didn’t worry about whether dry rot in the porch had been caused by a leaky gutter or a curse: he would simply curse the cheque that had it eradicated forthwith. Eleanor knew: now she worked in the Vice Chancellor’s office she made out his personal cheques. Julian was not business-like about his own finances: he would hand her tattered files stuffed with letters, bills and uncashed cheques, which he had found at the bottoms of drawers. She would divide them as best she could between university and personal, and hand over to Miss Richards in the faculty office whatever seemed relevant, and Julian would murmur into her ear, ‘Brilliant, brilliant: I am so bad at this kind of thing!’, and Eleanor would say, ‘You are a person on the grand scale, not a detail man at all,’ or some such thing, and he would seem to be relieved, as if a lifetime’s self-doubt had been lifted. She enjoyed making him happy. It was so easy. Georgina was perfect, he would say; he had to be as much on show if he got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of the night as he would receiving guests. He liked to shamble sometimes, he confessed. To belch, to burp, to fart. Georgina wouldn’t let him. Ellen purred over his imperfections; his belly, his broken tooth, the hairs in his nose. ‘I love you for what you aren’t,’ she’d say, ‘as much as for what you are.’
Julian’s wife Georgina came to call upon Julian at work one morning: strode in, tall and elegant, in pale, impeccable clothes. She was as coldly charming to Eleanor as no doubt she was to everyone of lower status—which, as Ellen confided in Bernard, must be almost the entire world—and would have gone straight through to see her husband but Eleanor said, ‘One moment, please, Mrs Darcy, I’ll just see if he’s free,’ so Georgina Darcy had to stand there until Eleanor said, ‘Professor Darcy can see you now. You may go through,’ which pleased Eleanor as much as Georgina Darcy’s cool nod had displeased her.
Bernard said, ‘Why do you always have to work so late?’ and Ellen said, ‘Because there’s so much to do,’ and so there was. Bernard said, ‘At least he’s not the kind to make passes at a secretary: not a secretary without a qualification to her name: beats me why he employed you.’ ‘Beats me,’ said Ellen, and Julian did, sometimes. She liked that.
He took her up to Bridport Lodge, the Vice Chancellor’s residence, a country house of elegant Georgian