proportions, when Georgina was away visiting friends in Scotland—naturally she had friends in Scotland: that kind of person did, said Liese. Leonard went shooting grouse sometimes. He sold Rolls-Royces now. Liese confided he wasn’t the man she’d married. She was glad her father was dead: Leonard was a mass murderer of little birds. ‘I expect he has to do it for the contacts,’ said Ellen, but it didn’t comfort Liese. Ellen, Brenda and Belinda were a little pleased to see this cloud pass over their friend’s life. While Georgina was away, Eleanor fingered through the garments in Georgina’s walk-in wardrobe: it was full of good tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters. Eleanor picked through Georgina’s jewel case, which was neatly packed with pearls and stud earrings—and then Eleanor would spend the evening sporting on the antique brass bed between Georgina’s linen sheets. She thought perhaps Ellen would have behaved differently. But linen sheets! Of course, there were staff to iron them, paid for by the university. The staff were always about. Julian was too grand to notice their presence, or else it served his purpose that they should be present, witness to his and Eleanor’s passion. Sometimes Eleanor had the feeling that Julian was devious, more devious than she allowed. Vice Chancellors, she supposed, often were.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Brenda asked Eleanor. She came up to the university office one morning, pushing her loaded pram up the hill. ‘Can’t you even keep it quiet? The whole town knows. The whole polytechnic knows. Everyone in the world knows except Bernard and Georgina, and eventually someone will break ranks and tell them too.’
‘Knows what?’ asked Eleanor. ‘What am I doing wrong?’
Brenda called Belinda and Belinda drove all the way to Bridport to see Eleanor. She came in a little Deux Chevaux. She and her husband had joined a religious group and now gave most of their money away to its leader. Her baby came too, in a carrycot on the back seat.
‘You don’t even seem to understand that what you’re doing is peculiar, Ellen. People have extramarital affairs in a hole-in-the-corner way. Not like this. You are throwing everything away. And Vice Chancellors of universities, especially with political connections, do not normally risk careers and marriage for the sake of someone like you.’
‘Then perhaps he’s mad,’ said Eleanor. ‘And I don’t see I’m throwing anything away. I’m having a really nice time, and I’d rather have a lover than a baby any day. If you ask me, it’s only women who can’t find lovers, who only have husbands, who have to make do with babies.’
Belinda’s baby dickered and fretted in her mother’s arms.
‘Well,’ said Belinda, ‘that puts me in my place,’ and Eleanor had to apologize. She did not wish to hurt her friend unnecessarily. But Belinda pulled out a very full breast and offered it to the baby. She had put on weight again.
‘Tell you what,’ Eleanor said, ‘I’ll speak to Bernard if that makes you feel any better.’
She did. She said to Bernard they’d agreed always to be honest with each other, and anyway he hadn’t married her properly, only at a civil ceremony which he hadn’t really acknowledged at the time, and out of pity, not love, and now she had found someone she really loved, who really loved her, whose interests coincided with hers, and so forth, and since they had no children she was free to follow the desires and devices of her own heart, surely, and so forth and so on, and what it amounted to, she was seeing and sleeping with another man, and it didn’t mean she and Bernard would have to split up, she needed time to discover if this was what she really wanted.
Bernard wept. She had hoped he would hit her, but all he did was sit there with tears running out of his eyes and snot running out of his nose. Julian would at least have reached for his handkerchief—and there would have been one to hand, crisp, white and laundered. Eleanor found Bernard a tissue and gave it to him. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘this kind of thing happens in marriages all the time.’
Then he asked her what he could do to make the marriage better, asked how had he failed her; he would do anything, anything, to keep her; and the more he grovelled the more she despised him: and yet she was surprised. She had not expected this. The old Bernard would not have behaved