charge fifty thousand pounds for the privilege. I daresay Eleanor Darcy thinks money grows out of everyone’s ears. It might, for Aura, if she were more inclined to talk about the ordinary things of life, such as what she gives her friends for Christmas or what she reads on holiday.
Another thing: Eleanor Darcy is not a still person, a quiet person, as I am, or try to be. During our interview she quite frankly wriggled. First one leg over the other, then the other over the one: torso first this way then that, sometimes slouching; only once, when talking about her period as Bride of Rasputin, Vice Chancellor’s wife at Bridport, did she sit in what I would describe as an ordinary, decorous and ladylike fashion. Although the room was not particularly warm, she wore only a white T-shirt—well, whitish: like so many others nowadays no doubt she uses a phosphate-free environment-friendly washing powder- and jeans. Energetic people, those whose minds and bodies are active, seem, if not to notice the cold, at least to rather enjoy being so. To go about without the vest, without the wellies, without the coat, is to some people as smoking is to others, a celebration of freedom, of coming of age, of an escape from parental control. ‘You can’t go out like that,’ says the mother, ‘it’s freezing!’ And the rest of life is spent without a coat.
Eleanor Darcy said she was thirty: I would give her thirty-four or five. She is good-looking enough but not stunningly beautiful: I am always surprised at the plainness of women for whom men develop irrational and obsessive passions, as Julian Darcy clearly had for Eleanor. How else to explain the events leading up to the Bridport Scandal? Napoleon’s Josephine was a little, spotty thing: Nelson’s Lady Hamilton a fat and blowsy piece. Eleanor Darcy is intelligent, of course, and intelligence in a woman does turn some men on, though not many. Hugo, thank God, is one of the few.
Intelligence, I have always thought, makes it difficult for a woman to wear make-up: perhaps it’s as simple a matter as the mobility of a face making the stuff sink in, vanish, fail to remain the smoothing mask it’s meant to be. Eleanor Darcy’s skin was patchy: she was using too dark a shade of foundation cream. She had smudged a little grey eye shadow around the eye area and lip-lined her mouth rather crudely, failing to fill in with actual colour as most people do: her brown hair frizzed out round her head in a rather uneven halo. I don’t think it had been permed, merely squidged and scrunched as it dried. By and large she seemed disinclined to pay her appearance much attention, as if there were other far more urgent things to attend to. The mothers of small children often look like this, as we know, but Eleanor didn’t even have this excuse. Her legs were muscular—the jeans were tight: perhaps she had put on weight recently—and she had a strong neck and a firm chin, a shiny nose and bright rather deep-set eyes. People’s appearances, of course, add up to more than the sum of their features. A kind of overall impression is delivered, which is sometimes belied by actual detail and is more, I suppose, to do with confidence than anything else. The fact is that Eleanor Darcy looked and acted as if she were Queen of the World, as if to be the one to bring down a government was all in the day’s work and she was now turning her attention to the future. I tried not to resent it. I tried to like her, not to be awed by her: to match the power of her vigorous mind with the centring energy I felt in me, by virtue of the fact that Hugo loved me. I did not, as it were, go empty handed into that bargaining chamber, and I was grateful for it.
She spoke, as I would have expected, in mid-English: a kind of neutral middle-classedness which blurred her origins: the kind used by lady news presenters on networked TV. But listen carefully, and occasionally the sloppy vowels of the suburbs would seep through to betray her origins: and even the slight nasal whine of the rather more underprivileged. The child’s experience of life comes through in the adult’s use of language—whether the desire to escape the original background altogether, or to camouflage, defiantly to accept, or, by denying,